Two Scams

One of my most important guidelines about expository writing is to be clear. It turns out that in some circumstances you can be clear and still confuse. The auto sales industry can do this at least two ways: Supply too much information, or not enough.

First, the not-enough-info option: It’s called sidewinding. A salesman gets his hands on a car not owned by the dealership, and sells it as if it were. The buyer is none the wiser unless they need to bring in the car for service later. And the dealership doesn’t get its commission. This happened to me a couple decades back. The dealer took care of the needed repair, and the salesman lost his job.

The other one happens in a lot of industries that involve sales, and you probably heard of it. The good old Bait and Switch. Something is offered for sale, and then the thing you want isn’t available but they have something else you can buy. The something else always works in the seller’s favor, and if it’s done right, the buyer is pretty happy. I ran into a blog post by Scott Adams (writer of Dilbert) about his experience with the bait and switch. Go read it. It’s too long for me to quote, but it’s worth reading. Here’s the link again. I think this version of the bait and switch routine is somehow related to the discovery that increasing one’s choices does not increase one’s happiness.

And since this is a writing blog, I had to find something in Scott’s post to point out. This is a subtle one:

So customers either accept the bait-and-switch or they don’t buy a truck, like me.

Scott saves himself here with that comma after “truck,” making it clear that the truck is not like him, but the refusal to buy was like what he did. (I almost wrote “like him,” which would have fallen into the same trap). The rule is to make the pronoun (me or I) agree with what you’re actually comparing. “Me” would be correct if it was “a truck like me,” but it has to be “I” if it’s “refused to purchase, like I refused.” “Like” is so close to the pronoun that we make the pronoun’s case go with “like” instead of with “don’t buy.”

Just be clear—don’t let your reader think you’re like a truck.