The Polymath Bash: what the Venerable Bede can teach us about corporate reporting
by Tamara O’Brien, TMIL’s roving reporter
In an early example of communication malfunction, at the age of 17 I failed to read the Manchester University undergraduate prospectus properly. And in the first week of term, learnt with some horror that I was to spend two years studying Anglo-Saxon as part of my English Language and Literature degree, not one.
Well, I made my peace with Anglo-Saxon and grew quite fond of the course’s star turn, the Venerable Bede. Completing the circle is the fact that I’ve spent most of my career working with a bona fide Bede scholar: none other than Claire Bodanis, founder and director of Falcon Windsor.
Unlikely as it seems, this preamble is extremely pertinent to today’s Trust me I’m listed blog.
First, some background on our hosts. Claire met Garth Gilmour, Head of Learning at Instil, through his boss, Tara Simpson, via a Dark Angels business writing course. Belfast-based Instil is a software development, consultancy and training company, specialising in bespoke solutions. Their clients are a roll-call of big hitters in the infosphere.
So far, so impressive. And, to a verbally-biased brain like mine, to be filed under the heading ‘clever stuff beyond human comprehension’.
But, reading Instil’s website, I found that much of what they deal with is language and how best to use it. The post ‘Does readability have a cost?’ from their Insights section was an eye-opener. And an intern’s entertaining account of a coding competition revealed that coders use terms I’m familiar with from linguistics.
The similarities don’t end there, as we all discovered in Instil’s latest ‘Bash’: a tech meetup for forward-thinking software developers.
The Polymath Bash
Claire was one of three guest speakers, with Ciaran Conliffe of Liberty IT and Philip Lawson of Flexera, expounding on the event’s polymath theme: how people’s interests outside software engineering could enrich their coding and development.
Some latitude was granted to Claire, who came at it from the angle of ‘What can [7th century Biblical scholar and historian] the Venerable Bede teach us about writing for a non-technical audience, particularly corporate reporting?’. The answer being, of course, quite a lot.
Consciously applying her hero’s methods, Claire explained that Bede’s writing embodied three characteristics vital for communication, especially of a technical nature:
Lesson #1: Give evidence to support your assertions.
The annual report gives the facts of a company’s year, which are then audited for truth and accuracy. Claire said that, in a similar vein, Bede was credited with being the first historian to view his source material with a critical eye (I think Herodotus et al may beg to differ, but let’s not be unduly nitpicky).
So, whether it’s having the storm-calming properties of a holy oil corroborated by a trustworthy source such as the priest Cynemund (who heard it off the priest Utta, also trustworthy); or having a robust set of KPIs to back environmental claims – give readers the facts, not just your opinion.
Lesson #2: Pay great attention to structure and signposting.
Today’s annual reports regularly come in at around 300 pages long – impossible to wade through without a clear structure. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, coincidentally also around 300 pages long, is a monument to clarity, simplicity and order – and here’s why:
· It’s presented in five books – a structure familiar from the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible
· There’s one story per chapter, summarised in the title. For example: ‘A fatal epidemic is halted by the intervention of King Oswald’, an early example of the headline (though as a copywriter I’d be less inclined to give away the whole story)
· The last chapter recapitulates the entire book, with a handy timeline and a note on the author, affirming his credentials.
Lesson #3: Above all – write for your reader.
Bede had a problem. Latin was the thinking person’s lingua franca, but the Teach Yourself books of the time were all written by Romans – hard for the English, never perhaps the most enthusiastic of linguists, to get their heads round. So he wrote De orthographia – a Latin primer, and I guess what today we’d call a style guide, for the non-native speaker. A lesson in putting your reader first – something everyone involved in reporting, or any kind of technical writing, would do well to learn.
Bede or the Beano
I wish I had space to cover Ciaran and Philip’s talks, on their respective side-hustle passions in writing and music – because they were great, engaging speakers. Suffice to say I now see software developers in a much less formidable (but still impressive) light. And what they had to say about practice, drafting, editing, teamwork and constructive criticism made me realise the huge amount we have in common.
Claire summed it up by saying ‘We all write in one way or another. I think one of the best things you can do to improve as a writer is to practise being an audience, by reading as widely as you can – whether it’s Bede or the Beano!’
And just when we thought entente could not get more cordiale, Ciaran topped off proceedings by asking the golden question: “Claire, where we can we get your book?”