For Your Exformation...

One day long ago, my grandfather and his friend Will Crawford (for whom I was named) went for a walk in the woods of rural New Jersey where they lived. On their return, my grandfather (who would later gain notoriety as the "Fernwood Flasher") exclaimed to my grandmother, "We must have seen a million rabbits in the woods!"

Uncle Bill, standing behind him, held up his hand, fingers outstretched, and silently mouthed the word: Five.

Ever since then, when someone in my family exaggerates, someone else will hold up a hand and repeat Uncle Bill's silent five.

But we don't have to repeat the whole story, because we all know it. Almost every family, every group has some similar kind of communication--a running gag, a child's baby-talk name preserved as a nickname, a word used in a special way. People in the northern California village of Booneville even developed a local dialect, Boont, back in the 1920s. After one young couple was caught in flagrante on a pile of burlap bags, the Boont word for making love was "burlappin'."

Small Cue, Big Response
Now, terms like these, once understood, become extremely effective. They seem to pack an extra emotional punch. The smaller the cue, the more powerful the response. Five upheld fingers are a devastating retort to some long-winded claim.

But to get the impact, you don't send a lot of information--you send almost none. Instead you rely on the knowledge you share with your reader or listener.

A Danish writer, Tor Norretranders, invented a term for this in his book The User Illusion: exformation. Exformation is short for "explicitly discarded information," the information you strip out of a message because you know your reader already has it. The more you share with your reader, the less you have to say.

Norretranders's prime example is a communication between the French novelist Victor Hugo and his publisher. On holiday just after the publication of his novel Les Miserables, Hugo sent the following telegram to his publisher: ?

To which his publisher replied: !

The anecdote would of course lack all meaning, never mind emotional impact, if I hadn't supplied the background (the information).

How Much Do They Know?
For Webwriters, exformation is a great big problem. How much of our text assumes shared knowledge? How much do we need to spell out? And is our exformation the same as our readers'?

Some years ago I gave a seminar on Webwriting, using my book Writing for the Web as the text. Everyone in the group was a Canadian, except for one--a Brazilian who didn't understand the title of the first chapter, "Hype and Hypertext." What, she wanted to know, was "hype"?

Like a carefully explained joke, "hype" had lost most of its punch by the time I managed to translate the term. Then I ran into yet another bafflement: a Canadian member of the seminar objected to the term "bulleted list" because "bullet" to her had a connotation of violence that she didn't like.

The Brazilian needed to be brought into the community that has "excessive advertising" as the exformation for "hype." The Canadian was trying to take us all out of the community that uses "bullet" as a term for a black dot--by making "violence" part of the exformation around the word even when used typographically.

The Web is a medium that thrives on jolts--prompt, frequent emotional rewards, given when computers boing, graphics jump around the screen, or we get the answer to our question. Strip all but the absolute minimum information out of your text, and your readers get a major jolt if they share your exformation.

Jolts or Explanations?
Your readers come from all over the world, and from different generations. The knowledge you share with them is uncertain, but you know they're on your site looking for jolts, not long-winded explanations of one-liners. Explaining too much is almost as bad as explaining too little--it implies you think your visitors are ignorant.

Well, sometimes they are ignorant, and they do need to know the information that you've explicitly discarded. How to do it?

If your text is technical, or uses regional dialect, or has lots of unusual idioms, one solution is to create a glossary. Each unusual or difficult expression can be a link to its definition. Those sharing your exformation can skip the links; those who need the definition can make a quick hop and then hop back again.

If your site is for those who read English as a foreign language, or who are trying to learn a technical vocabulary, you can simply add an explanation or definition in the text, or make it clear from the context. But what seems clear to you may be opaque to your readers, so it's wise to test your text before you put it before the world.

A third approach is one I've used in the article. Remember that I said my grandfather became notorious as the "Fernwood Flasher"? If you recall the 1970s TV sitcom Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, you remember that Mary's grandfather was a demented old man who went around in a raincoat, exposing himself. You would have instantly seen his image in your memory, even if you didn't recall his name--Victor Kilian.

If you didn't know the show, however, you had to read the rest of this post to find out what the heck "Fernwood Flasher" was supposed to mean!