Respecting Your Readers, Pt. 2: Failed FEEs

By Robert Walker Cohen

Find “Respecting Your Readers Part 1: Time,” at this link.

In our last post, we introduced Warren Buffett’s famed use of the FEE device — the Friendly Everyday Example — throughout much of his career and his most successful corporate communications. For more on the FEE, I recommend reading “The Buffett Letters, Pt. 3: Enter The FEE,” as it both clearly defines the term and explores Buffett’s recurring use of a particular FEE over several decades.

As discussed in yesterday’s post, FEEs are not simply analogies. They are teaching tools that leverage the average reader’s everyday experience in order to help them grasp a new or more esoteric subject. At their best, they can make the abstract concrete, lighten the heavy, and soften the sharp.

Although Buffett has used them frequently, they aren’t foolproof.

When a FEE backfires, it can distract readers from the intended message and aggravate existing brand weaknesses.

When and how do FEEs fail? Predictably, when they demonstrate some degree of writerly hubris.

FEEs that reflect writerly hubris typically manifest in three ways: Pride, Overreach, and Recklessness.

Let’s expand —

1. Pride. Serves the writer instead of the reader, reaching to make something graspable but making it about the writer instead. An example that exists to demonstrate range, wit, or cultural literacy has stopped explaining anything. The abstraction stays abstract; only the author comes into focus. The tell is that the writer seems smug or overly self-satisfied by their own intelligence. ‍

Example: On May 11, 2017, discussing Macy's on CNBC's Mad Money, Jim Cramer reached for the Second World War. "Macy's is like the Polish Army in WWII" — which, he explained, fielded cavalry against German tanks, with predictable results. The point underneath was ordinary: a retailer bringing obsolete tools to a fight it can't win. It needed no help.

What the FEE added was Cramer, visibly enjoying his own range. It did not survive contact with people who knew the history. The Polish Embassy in Washington issued a statement calling the comparison inaccurate and insensitive, noting that Polish cavalry never charged German tanks — a small number of 1939 charges were directed against infantry, artillery and supplies — and that the image is Nazi and Communist propaganda still circulating in Western media. The embassy demanded a retraction and got one, with Cramer replying that he was sorry and it would not happen again.

That is the specific risk of Pride. A FEE reached for to demonstrate cultural literacy gets judged by people who have it.

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2. Overreach. Needs more explaining than the original concept did, trying to teach while adding only another thing to learn. This can make the heavy even heavier. If you have to unpack the analogy, you have swapped one obscure thing for another and charged the reader for the trip. Aesthetically clunky, distracting, and disrespectful of your reader's time.

Example: On June 28, 2006, chairing a Senate Commerce Committee session, Ted Stevens set out to explain why internet providers should be able to prioritize some traffic:

"And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

Note the sequence. He opens by denying an analogy about trucks that nobody offered. He replaces it with a second one about tubes. Then he spends three clauses explaining how the second one works. The concept underneath was congestion — shared capacity, finite, slower when crowded. Anyone who has sat in traffic already had it. The metaphor wasn't even wrong. Push more data through a node and it does become congested. It simply cost more to explain than the thing it was explaining. What survived was the phrase, not the argument: the speech spawned remixes and a Jon Stewart takedown, and is still described as one of this century's least persuasive examples of political rhetoric.

Overreach rarely ends this loudly. Stevens is remembered because he was a senator on camera. In writing, the same failure just closes the tab.‍ ‍

3. Recklessness. Tonally deaf with respect to the context, attempting to soften an uncomfortable truth but revealing only a lack of sincerity or integrity. When leadership tries to handwave away a major crisis by way of a FEE, it can attract more negative attention and press than the original crisis, betraying a lack of seriousness, incompetence, contempt, or worse. Rather than soften the sharp, a poorly handled FEE pushes the pointy end of the truth further against leadership.

‍Example: In July 2007, with credit markets already wobbling, Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince told the Financial Times: "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing." He was out by November.

Three years later he explained to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission what he had actually meant: no single bank could withdraw from leveraged lending on its own and expect to still be in the business afterward.

‍That argument was defensible. The dance floor FEE wasn't — and it’s that image of gleeful “dancing,” amidst the great unraveling of 2007, that remains.

The Writerly Test

To avoid any of the above, I recommend a simple test.

First, state the core message — without the FEE — in a plain sentence. Then, ask yourself the following:

‍Is there anything the FEE does that the plain truth can’t on its own?

If the FEE does not help enhance the audience’s understanding in any way, nor sincerely soften or lighten a difficult message, then you should remove it. Otherwise, you risk writerly hubris.

Run the test on Prince’s “we’re still dancing” during 2007, and the result is instructive. His plain sentence — no bank can walk away from this business alone and expect to still have it — is clear, defensible, and considerably harder to argue with than a dance floor.

The FEE added nothing the truth couldn't carry. It only added a picture of a man enjoying himself while the building came down.

That is the whole cost of a failed FEE: hubris in the writer causes disrespect to arrive at the reader.

The plain sentence is usually the more respectful one. Use the FEE when you have a message that the plain truth can’t carry.