This is an All Ears English podcast episode 2026.
Three ways to sharpen your writing with Lane Green, columnist from The Economist.
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In today's episode, I interview Lane Green from The Economist.
Lane shows us where most people go wrong with their writings.
Plus you'll get three concrete things you can do right now to up your writing level.
Listen in today.
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Hello, Lane.
Welcome to the show.
How are you today?
Ben, fine, thanks.
How are you doing?
Thank you for having me on.
I'm very excited to have you on the show today.
I would like to do a quick intro for your bio here for our listeners.
Guys, today we have Lane Green on the show.
Lane is the language columnist and Spain correspondent at The Economist, won the journalism award from the linguistic society of america in 2017 and is a former adjunct professor of global affairs at nyu new york university.
He's based in madrid currently and has lived in london, new york city and berlin.
All three fantastic cities, four fantastic cities.
Lane, welcome again to the show.
Thank you so much awesome.
Tell us a little bit about your column before we get into la writing.
Broadly, What kinds of topics do you cover at The Economist?
Well, I have a great variety of interests in language and I've been doing the column for over 10 years, so there's not a whole lot I've never gotten to.
To give an example of something I got to recently for the first time, I did a column on gesture and the way people use their hands when they're talking, which you can't see my hands unless I raise them up here.
But they're very important in communication, and people often send a second channel of information with their hands, while they're also using their voice and their words, something that I'd never looked at before.
But the column deals with everything from accent to grammar, to style, to the politics of language, to international comparisons, issues of language in some of the countries I travel to, like Spain.
And you know it's really 10 years have given me a lot of different opportunities to write about lots of different elements.
Wow, that's fantastic.
We might have to have you on again to talk about one of your columns, because these are the topics that we love as well.
How does culture intersect with language, nonverbal communication?
What does it mean for human connection is what we like to bring it down to.
So today, though, Lane, we're really getting into writing.
And I know you have a book out, a new book called Writing with Style.
It sounds like it's a new edition of like we are kind of updating what we've known in the past.
What would you say, broadly speaking, where do people go wrong with writing the English language?
Is there a way to kind of summarize that broadly before we get into your tips?
Yeah, I think there is.
I think if I had to put all the tips into one tip, it's that people try too hard.
They often are trying too hard to impress.
And that means they often try to imitate difficult and complicated styles because they want to show that they have mastered the hard words and the difficult grammar.
And so I think that element of over-trying causes a lot of the problems in writing.
That's really interesting.
That is such a good point.
We see that we do some training for the IELTS exam here at All Ears English.
And that's what we see over there too, when people are throwing in high level words but don't fully understand those words necessarily.
So they don't work together.
They're not cohesive, right?
It's better almost to have a more average word, but make your whole message more clear.
Would you agree?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I love it.
So let's get into your tips today.
I would love to know from you three ways to write with style.
I mean, that's the title of your book.
Let's just go right into it.
What can our listeners learn from you?
What is the first way, first clear thing we can do to write with style?
What do you think, Lane?
I think the first level I'd start at is just the individual words themselves.
And the words that you want to choose from have a couple of things in common.
They tend to be short.
They tend to be words that everybody knows.
As a historical matter and as a linguistic matter that might interest some of your listeners.
They tend to be from the old Germanic stock of the English language.
So the words that were around in the Anglo-Saxon period a thousand years ago, sort of before the Norman conquest of 1066, if any of you readers or listeners are history fans.
Yes.
They're the earthiest, most basic words in the language, things like help and fire and water and stop.
And they have a power and an immediacy that makes them the go-to words that you want to make most of your diet.
That way, when you use a fancy word, when you use a technical term or a special word, it will stand out.
This is not to say you should never use a longer word or a word from Latin or French or Greek or one of those.
But those words stand out so much the better when they are surrounded by that everyday, clear language.
Yes, I love that.
So you said earthy words.
I love that expression.
You threw out a couple of examples, fire.
What would be just so we can kind of really get our heads around this?
Do you have any examples of maybe a wordy sentence and how you would say let's change that and make that a more clear sentence?
Do you have anything?
Let's stay with words just for a moment, because I have, you know, I said earthy, not even thinking of that, but it is a great example.
You have earthy, which is Germanic, and you have terrestrial, which is the Latin equivalent.
You have hearty, which is a Germanic word, and you have cordial, which is a Latin French word.
You have lots of examples where the word from French or Latin is just higher.
It's a little colder.
It's a little more formal.
And those words that are really genuine, that give you that sense of a genuine and kind of direct style.
They really come from that Germanic style.
So those are the words that you'd rather have somebody wish you a hearty welcome than a cordial welcome, I think generally.
Yeah.
And I agree with what you're saying.
It really does create this distance immediately when we use those words, fancier words cordial terrestrial,
It just creates distance.
Here on this show we talk a lot about human connection, and this can happen through writing if we're choosing the right words.
I love that.
That is so good.
I feel like all native speakers and non-native speakers, this is so applicable.
This is for everyone writing in English.
Okay.
That is the first tip.
What would be your second tip then, Lane?
Okay.
So when we start putting the words together, that's when magic really starts to happen.
And the next Level I like to look at is kind of phrasings and imagery.
If you're a beginning writer or an insecure writer, the temptation is to reach for phrases that you've seen already.
And those are otherwise known as cliches.
What you're really trying to do, as an intermediate and an advanced writer, is to write afresh, to really seize your reader's imagination by combining words in ways that nobody's ever done before.
For
And yes, it's hard.
And yes, it takes work and it takes experience and it takes a certain level of mastery of the language.
But really, it's not rocket science to come up with an interesting image.
For example.
You know, I thought about this thing, about words, and I was going to say something.
Like you know, a fancy word is like a sparkling jewel that will show off better if you put it in a simple setting.
Now, I've never heard anybody make exactly that metaphor before.
It's not a brilliant metaphor, but it's one that everyone can see in their mind.
There's one that I came up with on my own.
You could come up with a cliche to say the same thing.
But I think if you can create just the littlest image like that jewel in a simple setting, then you communicate very directly.
And images, visual images, concrete words like jewel and so forth.
They also activate the, the visual part of the brain, so that readers have two ways of understanding what you're trying to say.
And I think that's such a powerful aid.
Yeah, this is a tip we can take from novelists, right?
Barbara Kingsolver or any good novel you've read.
They spend so much time doing this, building a picture in your mind because they have to.
And it is so unique.
The words they use, they don't rely on cliches, right?
Otherwise, when I hear myself use a cliche, I roll my eyes immediately, whether I write it or whether I say it.
What would be just some examples of really annoying cliches in your mind?
What do you think?
Is there anything you see a lot you just wish you could kind of X out and get rid of entirely?
I think there's something that a lot of people who use language at work will think of as the business cliches.
The sort of blue sky thinking, out of the box thinking, I'll circle back to you later.
I'll reach out.
Let's take this offline.
The elephant in the room and all the 800 pound gorilla.
All of these are kind of much loathed cliches from the workplace.
And you know, at some point the elephant in the room was a brand new phrase and it was probably quite striking and original at that time.
It would have been great to use.
But once everybody started using that cliche, you have to try to move on and come up with something fresher.
I love that.
So it makes sense and it's worth the work to spend a little bit more time.
It also keeps your brain sharp around vocabulary and writing language.
If we're just being lazy, relying on cliches, we don't exercise that muscle in our brain to create new language right lane.
Yeah, george orwell was a was a great thinker on this subject.
He wrote an essay called politics in the english language where he says exactly that that if you're stringing along ready-made bits of language already, it kind of saves you the work of thinking.
And you don't want to write without thinking.
I think that should go without saying, unless you're trying to just get away with something.
And he said, to make your meaning plain and to force you and your readers to really think it's worth that extra effort to come up with fresh original language.
Yes, I love it.
So Second tip, stay away from cliches, invent new imagery, new language.
Okay.
I love it.
So Lane, what would be the third tip that you would give our listeners?
This is on the level of grammar and it's a really simple tip.
It saves you so much trouble, which is just use lots of periods, as we call them in America, or full stops, as they're called in Britain.
In other words, that key on your keyboard is the most powerful one that you've got, because it keeps your sentences crisp, active and direct.
And it keeps you from getting in the kind of tangles that cause grammar problems.
You get subjects and verbs that don't match or you get dangling modifiers.
You get all kinds of problems that arise from sentences that are just too complex.
They're hard to create accurately.
And even if you do so, they're harder for your reader to read.
So the way I try to describe it in the book is that the period kind of lets your reader relax for a second.
The act of understanding a sentence is kind of a mental high wire act where you're trying to put lots of pieces together that form the grammar and the words of the sentence and get a meaning out of it.
When the period arrives you can kind of file away the meaning and you can drop the structure and move on to the next sentence.
But those really long, twisted sentences, they make you work and work, and work and work without any relief.
And it's really hard work on the brain and what's called the working memory of the brain.
You have to hold this whole structure in your mind while you're also trying to get to the meaning.
And the longer you make the reader wait before that period arrives, the more strain you're putting on them.
And ultimately, if you do it again and again, you just wear your readers out.
100%.
It reminds me of reading legal documents and contracts.
Oh, it's exhausting.
I've just done my last column on the subject of legalese, so you can see it in The Economist of June 10th.
I'm not sure when people will hear this, but it will be the one that will come out with that date.
And my column is on why lawyers write that way.
Oh my gosh, i am looking forward to reading that.
So it sounds like the period is a guardrail right.
It helps us to make sure we put those guards around what we're writing.
So we are forced to start a new thought to give our audience a break.
Just one bonus question here lane, you're based in madrid and we've found in the past that some of our listeners are students from especially europe, but basically outside of the us have kind of come to us with a more, I guess, what I would call flowery that's probably a cliche too kind of a flowery, more drawn out writing style.
That might be a little more wordy.
And it feels to me like that's been taught in universities.
But here, at least what I learned in school and college was this more direct, concise writing style.
Have you found that?
Have you noticed that in Europe, that that's a value in what's being taught?
What do you think?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, one is the kind of style that's valued.
And in a number of places in Europe very long, difficult sentences are seen as kind of a mark of erudition.
So German academic writing, in particular bureaucratic writing, and some others can also have these incredibly long sentences that are very hard to get to the end of.
And then there's another thing going on, which is that writing writers in english who come from latin language countries, that is to say romance languages like spanish, portuguese and french, will often overuse that layer of the English vocabulary because it's quite familiar and natural to them.
But, as I was saying earlier, you really want to aim for this Germanic layer as the base layer of your writing and then sprinkle in those Latin derived words which are almost always higher register, more complicated, a little harder to process.
So there's a bit of an overuse of those words by people from like Spain, where I live and Right.
So, create your base with the simple you know, as I'm just going to use that word again earthy words.
I love it.
I like that word to describe words and then sprinkle in, as you're saying, more high level words to up the level of what you're saying.
This is fantastic.
I think this is going to really hit home with our listeners and super applicable for them to increase their writing level up one step higher.
Lane, tell us about your book and where we can find it.
Cause I'd like to learn more about these tips.
So this is the new edition of The Economist Magazine Style Guide.
We've been around for about 180 years, so we've had a little time to think about how we write and what makes for good sentences.
And the first version of the guide went through 12 different editions, starting about the late 1980s until the last edition.
And my task was to rewrite it, not as a 13th edition, but starting over, rewriting the guidance from beginning to end.
But essentially the tips that I've just given you are our philosophy, right?
For an intelligent lay person who can follow your argument if you give them clear direct, active sentences in language that everyone knows.
That's been the philosophy of The Economist.
Forever.
And people often tell us that you know, an economist article reads like an economist article and not like anything else.
You'll see two pieces from different sections and different writers.
And they both read far more like each other than either one of them does like The Guardian or The New York Times.
Well, that's the idea.
That's the idea behind our style.
And it does make for a very kind of a very recognizable style.
And this book goes on sale in Europe and the UK on June 15th and it'll be on sale in the US on July 4th.
And your online bookstores will have it.
It comes out from Profile in UK and from Pegasus in the US.
And it shouldn't be hard to find.
And if it is, feel free to track me down on my website and I'll tell you how to find a copy.
Fantastic, Lane.
Thank you so much.
So guys, I want to encourage our listeners here, go ahead and check out Lane's book.
This has been really interesting for me as a native speaker, and I think our listeners love it as well.
Thank you for coming on the show, Lane.
I hope to have you again soon, and I'll check out your column as well.
Really interesting.
Well, thank you so much, Lindsay.
It's been a pleasure, and I'd be very happy to come back.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye.
All right.
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