Although it is just a tiny section of the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel in the Vatican, the hand of God reaching down to touch the hand of Adam is one of greatest works of art in history. It was painted by Michelangelos Buonarotti, better known as Michelangelo, a Renaissance artist who hung out with Popes and kings and was known to paint the faces of demons with portraits of the various people who interfered with his art.
The thing with art is that you can’t do it by committee. A lot of people who are good at being on a committee do not want that to be true. In fact, there are people right now organizing committees so that they can be on them and try to get some art done.
Writing is an art and writing can’t be done by committee. Well, that’s not altogether true. Writing can be attempted by a committee but what happens is that the highest-ranking or most annoying person wins (that’s often the same person). But it is rarely the person with the best writing skills. The result is that the writer is prevented from doing a good job by having to write poorly. Amateur writers tend to fall in love with own phrases and want to include even stupid stuff in the writing simply because they wrote it.
I don’t know why the many Vatican officials who tormented Michelangelo during his years painting the Sistene Chapel (he was over 80, too) thought they knew more about art than he did. Probably because they were Vatican officials and were impressed with their own achievements. But they offered needless opinions and demanded changes and revisions, and, in the end, they drove him nuts and did nothing but annoy the artist and impede progress.
I don’t know why non-writers want to inflict their poor grammar, mispellings, and ludicrous sentence constructions (not to mention oddball ideas) onto writers, but they do.
Today’s writers are most apt to see this sort of writing-by-committee when working for corporate clients. I do a fair amount of that stuff, and I’m constantly impressed by people who can scarcely compose an email insisting on rewriting my text. The problem is not just the annoyance factor but the fact that non-writers generally can’t write well.
Some day I’ll publish some of my most favorite changes inflicted on otherwise competent writing by committee members. But today I’ll leave you with one.
It comes from a government agency that was allowed to review some work that I did for a client. I’m going to have to take a few liberties to protect the parties involved, but we (the client’s content and my writing) placed a chart in the text that recorded the many things that were observed over the course of a particular study. The chart was titled, “Observations,” because writers like things like that, you know, a word that means what you intend. The chart then spelled out and quantified many clinically relevant things that were observed while the study was going on.
Long story short, the governmental official (a person who has no doubt been on many committees) said that was not correct, unclear, and misleading. We had to change it to “Observed Observations.” I actually thought for a second I was on Candid Camera, but he was from the government and he won. The reviewer felt it was important to specify that these were actual observations that were observed, as opposed, I guess to observations we might have missed.
The sad thing is that I was always afraid somebody would see that (or maybe it would get on Jay Leno) and find out I was the writer and think I was a knucklehead.
You can’t write by committee. That’s one reason I enjoy online writing so much. The corporate guys are only minimally aware there even is an Internet!
