Writing Boots

Dylan Thomas is said to have once interrupted himself, in his cups and pontificating, by saying, "Someone’s boring me. I think it’s me."

I just returned from a wet weekend in Sacramento, Calif., where my sister-in-law lives. Her friends and family gathered less to celebrate and more to marvel that she somehow found time and reason to work so hard to add to a life that’s already so rich.

Anyway: During the weekend, which involved meeting a wonderful variety of California women—feminist activists, WPFL football players, scholars and wits—and I heard myself lecturing, Thomas-like, about writing.

"There are two ways to interest people with writing," I was telling the nose guard on the Sacramento Sirens (she wants me to do a Plimpton "Paper Lion" thing with the team). "You either take a subject they think is foreign and make it sound familiar to them. Or you take a subject they think they know backwards and forwards and write about it in such fresh detail that it comes to seem to them as strange."

"And of course the best stories …" here I paused for a sip of gin and leaned back regally, "achieve both."

Both my parents were communicators—my mother a novelist, my dad an ad man-turned-essayist. I’m a journalist and I’ve covered (and consulted on) corporate communication my entire career.

So you don’t have to sell me on the importance of writing and communication. But you do have to sell management. And so do I.

Yet I’m somewhat ashamed to say that after all these years of advocating for communicators (they’re my species!), the following scenario is still a bad dream: I’m at a cocktail party and and I meet a CEO and he says his corporate communication director is demanding access to senior management meetings and a raise and he asks: "Now really: What the hell does she know that I and the rest of my senior leadership doesn’t?"

I’m not sure what I’d say. I can’t very well say, "You and your senior leaders are probably out of touch with all your key constituencies." I can’t say, "All you boys care about are the numbers. You need a liberal arts major on the team!" And I’ll be damned if I’ll say with a straight face, "Haven’t you read the Watson-Wyatt study that shows employee communication excellence leads to a higher share price?"

I’m afraid I’d hem and haw (just as the CEO expected) thereby killing our communication director’s chances at that management access and raise we all know in our hearts—but do we truly believe it in our heads?—she richly deserves.

Readers, do you have an elevator speech for communicators? Let’s hear it.

My four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Scout asked me if I thought her stuffed dog was “cute.”

I told her I don’t know what that word means.

“It means funny and pretty,” she said.

As good a definition as any, and it helped me think about why I hate the word “cute”: I like my humor funny and my beauty pretty. Mixing them waters each down.

Some words make our language banal, and other words make us less articulate. ("Lazy" comes to mind; calling someone "lazy" is almost always a way to duck out of a deeper explanation of the person’s general unwillingness.)

What words do you wish didn’t exist?