ONLY CLEAN HANDS MAKE CLEAR WRITING

        Honesty is not only the best policy. It is the only policy for success in strategic communications. If you write straight from the heart, you’ll find that the rest of the job takes care of itself.
       “Clean hands” is actually the title of an important legal doctrine. Its definition is as follows, according to www.businessdictionary.com. 
       “ Legal principle that the party petitioning for equity and judicial action must itself be free of inequitable or fraudulent dealings.”
        I feel the same concept applies to writers. In other words, an author must abstain from deficient writing, just like a plaintiff must refrain from unlawful conduct. If not, they both lose believability. 
       This connects with Joy Bergmann’s Clear Writing Workshop. Building muscular text, with lively verbs and fit sentences, comes easier if you are being genuine. That’s because integrity eliminates the need for flimsy material.  My journalism days bear out that belief.
       I worked for 10 years as a community newspaper reporter for Passaic Valley Today Newspapers in Woodland Park, NJ. The job involved covering stories in Totowa, Little Falls, and Woodland Park in southern Passaic County. When writing, I followed the Five W’s and one H: who, what, where, when, why, and how. This ensured the story left no question unanswered.
        Remember that your audience will raise its eyebrows at any holes in your content.  Readers will wonder why the writer neglected a relevant point.  They will ask “Was it due to lack of attention? Was it writer inexperience? Or was it a dishonest author? Such doubts will undermine your reputation as a writer.    
       It is true that Internet blogging is freer than journalism. You get to air your opinion as opposed to covering an event. You choose the topics of interest to explore. And you can express a lot more creativity.  
     Unlike reporting, you can reveal you prefer something over something else. You are not bound by the straitjacket of attributing statements with “said”. You don’t have to use a standard font for articles, captions, and headlines. And there’s no editor telling you to gut your article for an 11th hour advertisement, or to make room for another story.
    Even so, non-journalistic authors will find strength with factual backup. This especially holds true when discussing a popular topic or controversial issue. Clean hands are the essence of wholesome writing. Grounding your blog on solid information works well because your thread of your text has a thought pattern to follow.      
    If you know what you’re talking about, then you have a compass to direct the path of your prose. If you don’t, then you will be struggling. How can you choose the most apt words if you don’t know, or won’t acknowledge, what is best to say. That reduces your credibility, and your audience’s trust in you.
   One example is last year’s British Petroleum’s (BP) public relation campaign about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the BP’s gaffes was its fluid story on the spill flow rate. The corporation issued different figures on how many thousands of barrels of crude per day were leaking.  The changing statements only underscored that BP did not truly know the tamount.  Admitting that right of way would have helped the company’s PR department gain the skeptical public’s trust.  
   And who can forget former New York Times writer Jason Blair? He wrote many stories with plagiarism, invented quotes, and fictional interviews. His lack of authenticity forced him to fill in the blanks with falsehoods, which readers inevitably spotted.  Blair’s freewheeling at The New York Times killed his career and hurt the daily paper’s name. The scandal marked a low point in the Times’ 150-year plus history.       
   I can sum it up with my takeoff on a well-known proverb. The road to sell is paved with good intentions. Over history, many people have tried fly-by-night writing tactics. They think they can succeed in convincing an audience with unconvincing language.  Exaggeration, fabrication, haziness, and ostentation may appeal to some writers because they are convenient.  Those sins come with a high price.
   Dirty writing sullies both author and publication and turns off the audience. That is why clear writing requires clean hands. Without that, the pen,  although mightier than the sword, becomes a double edged blade that wounds many people.