Who Gets to Decide Whether Wording is Ambiguous?
If you write or edit at work, you’ve wrangled over whether a word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous—open to more than one meaning. Like missing a typo, wrangling over ambiguity is a hazard of your job.?
Even the word ambiguous is ambiguous. Broadly speaking, wording can be ambiguous in three ways:
In Garner’s Modern English Usage, you’ll find three more ways: grammatical ambiguity, grouping ambiguity, and modification ambiguity.
You’ll also find miscues, where a reader is briefly misled or confused by inapt wording, punctuation or typography. There: I omitted the Oxford comma, causing Grammarly, and maybe you, to expect a third example: “1) inapt wording, 2) punctuation or typography, or 3) letter casing.” (If you’re a grammar geek, you're grinning.)
When you write or edit carefully, you strive to disarm these tripwires. You reword here, repunctuate there, balancing clarity against grace. At times, you find your attentiveness exhausting. Especially if you, like Francis Bacon, “write not so that you can be understood but so that you cannot be misunderstood.”
Ambiguity: My lifelong peeve
For as long as I can remember, ambiguity has been my bane, detecting it my superpower.
In 1981, I penned a letter to my local newspaper. Anticipating the row over the Brexit bus ads, I argued that local voters had been misled by a ballot initiative’s slogan, “No more bars, no more crime.” Semantically, that pairing could be understood in two ways:
Yet “No continuation of bars” was, in fact, the intent; all bars would now be shut down. That outcome, I argued, was semantically, and thus civilly, illegitimate. The paper agreed. So did readers. They revoted, and the errant outcome was reversed.
A decade later, for my Master's thesis in Technical Communication, I explored how car drivers deal with ambiguous verbal directions (“You Can’t Miss It”).
A decade after that, in a Washington Post essay, I explained what it was like to be—or to live with—someone who finds the most straightforward wording ambiguous (“Does Person 1 Drive Person 2 Nuts?”)
And in 2014, I founded and briefly tended a LinkedIn group, Clearly Ambiguous.?
Sometimes (“No more crime”), my obsession with ambiguous wording has made me a local hero. Other times it has irked my wives—or my superiors.?
Don’t try this at work
In 1978, as a fresh college graduate, I joined a research-and-development department, editing double-spaced report drafts by hand. One afternoon, my manager peeked over my shoulder and saw, to his displeasure, a river of blue ink.
“Paul, why did you rewrite that sentence?” he demanded.?
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“Because if I hadn’t,” I replied, setting a trap, “half our readers would think it meant [A], not [B].”?
Grabbing the page, my manager furrowed his brow and studied the original sentence. “You’re wrong: No one would think it means [A].”
I had him. “You’ve proved my point,” I replied. “It does mean [A]; I asked the engineer.” (Try this stunt at your peril.)
Later, as a writer for a nuclear-safety institute, I was proofreading the annual report. When I read “The new control room requires fewer workers,” I bounded to the copy editor. “Some readers,” I explained, “might think we’re saying, ‘The new control room is so cramped, we can’t fit as many workers as we used to.’” It was clearly ambiguous. But not to our editor. Reddening with rage, she refused to even read the explanation I offered from Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Soon, word of an impertinent wiseass reached my manager.
My wise ass was fired.
Normals, sentries, and sleepers?
You know that ambiguous image that, depending on where you focused, could look like a rabbit or a duck? Maybe it took you several seconds to discern the second animal. Or a good minute. Or forever.
Verbal ambiguity works like that. You respond as a Sleeper, a Normal, or a Sentry:?
Maybe you’re attuned, say, to syntactic ambiguity but not lexical. You get wordplay (“Therapy can help torture victims”). But you don’t get why your partner blows a fuse when asked to “turn up the air conditioning.”?
When I vent about an ambiguous choice of words, I’m often advised, “Why not just go with whichever interpretation is more likely?” Three reasons:?
Who gets to decide
When you’re writing or editing for others, disagreements over ambiguity are inevitable. How clear is clear enough? Who should have the final say??
I don’t have answers. I do have thoughts:
That much is clear.
Or is it?
? 2023 Paul F. Stregevsky
About the author
For more than 40 years, Paul Stregevsky has worked as a technical writer, technical editor, science writer, proposal writer, corporate writer, and personal?essayist. He lives in Maryland.?See his?other LinkedIn articles.
Ghostwriter & Speaker ?? I help people perfect their stories and their storytelling skills.
2 年Paul, This could your lifelong manifesto! Thanks for writing it down with such specificity!
Excellente... No argument from me (hang on, is that ambiguous?)