The best is left unsaid—sometimes

By Kristin Fehlauer

Who is the person in publishing whose job it is to decide what to print on the back of a book? You know, the person who decides whether to provide a brief summary of the plot or to simply quote laudatory blurbs? No, better not tell me—I’d rather not know who’s responsible for depriving me of my beloved summaries.

Because I do love them. I love the few lines that sketch out a brief story, possibly in the abstract (“The story of three people who…”, “A saga of intrigue…”). I love how with a few broad strokes they paint a hazy but captivating shape of an as-yet unknown narrative. And, to be honest, in many cases that’s enough for me; no need to buy the book to find out exactly what happens. Hang on…I may have just answered my question about why they choose not to print them…

It isn’t just capsule summaries on a book jacket that delight me. For instance, some of my favorite moments in the long-running British television series Doctor Who are the brief vignettes they show that allude to off-screen adventures; Clara and fish people in “The Caretaker,” for example, or Amy and Rory’s anniversary party in “The Power of Three.”

Even better is an evocative title. In Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp, Mr. Earbrass always plucks the name of his next novel from a notebook in which he maintains a list of potential titles. I fell in love with this idea and started keeping a list of my own. The phrases I choose to record don’t necessarily need to be for books, they could be other creative works. One recent addition is “A Reasonable Tea.” I’d read/watch/gaze at/listen to that!

Sadly, this kind of poetic elegance is a luxury that corporate communications often cannot afford. When reaching out to customers or potential business partners, ambiguity can be disastrous. It can even happen among employees within a company, particularly if it is a large international firm where people work in far-flung corners of the globe and rarely—if ever—meet in person or interact in real time. It is far better for companies to put out clear messages that the intended audience—employees, stakeholders, society—will definitely understand. At Klein Wolf Peters, we put this idea front and center when we write or translate for our own customers.

But the problem isn’t limited to global enterprises. Right here in Munich, my colleague Richard and I find ourselves having to double-check and clarify what we’ve said or written to each other. We have the usual British/American misunderstandings, but that being said, we’re more or less the same age, we come from very similar cultural backgrounds, and we’ve also been working together for six years, so we have a large pool of shared experiences and references to draw on. In a way, this lulls us into a false sense of security—he so often knows what I’m talking about and vice versa that it rarely occurs to either of us to follow up and ask the other to confirm what they meant; by assuming we’ve understood each other, we risk ending up with different impressions of the same conversation.

Obviously, the other extreme isn’t necessarily healthy either: communicate too often or at too great a length and you risk having your audience tune you out. But there has to be a happy medium. For my part, I know that I need to refine my “ambiguity radar”—a sense of when something might not be as clear to others as it is to me. In a way, I’m trained for it: as a translator and editor, I constantly turn over words and phrases in my mind to see if there are multiple ways to understand them. The trick is to do that even in cases where you’re positive everything is clear. Make questioning and double-checking a habit!