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Michael Glover
  • ONLINE COURSE DEVELOPER AND COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT

On Writing Clearly

Dear reader, dear writer,

Very recently, the wildly successful Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, was asked to give advice about writing to young writers. Part of her reply was: ‘try for more clarity please’, be more accessible.

Similarly, the philosopher John Searle once said: ‘if you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself’. It’s a piece of wisdom I use to guide my own writing. Be clear. Be rapidly understandable. Don’t be obscure. Don’t be unnecessarily complex.

I find it works for me, whether I’m writing academic philosophy, history, a Whatsapp message, corresponding with a colleague, or writing advertising copy.
But let’s go a little deeper. Let’s say that: clear writing is an expression of clear thinking.

The idea is that: before you can communicate clearly, you have to think clearly. To write clearly, and to think clearly, there are a couple of basic methods.

First, if you can make the same point with fewer words, use fewer words. Second, ask the question: what is the core point I want to communicate? And have the answer very clear in your mind. Be able to say: The core point I want to make is… Third, ponder the question: which words will be easiest for my reader to understand? Fourth, in general, longer sentences are harder to write, and harder to read. Therefore, in general, write shorter sentences – for your sake and for your reader’s sake.

Writing simply includes an element of thoughtfulness about the reader’s experience. It involves thinking about the reader. It’s about thinking – what might it feel like to read this? In part, writing simply is a way of reducing the burden of interpretation for the reader. I don’t want to write a complex sentence that you have to read three times before you can understand it. Therefore, I often rewrite a sentence three times, so that the sentence is short and clear and understandable. I try to make my sentences more concise. More precise. More vividly understandable.

I do the hard labour of making a complex idea easy to understand, rather than making you do the hard labour of understanding my complex sentence. This is important so that the space for confusion and misunderstanding is closed down, minimised.

If any of my sentences were not immediately understandable to you, then I didn’t write those sentences well. That’s what I’m saying. Whatever the genre, a core part of writing well is writing clearly.

Did you have to re-read any of my sentences? I’d love to hear from you: which sentences were easy or difficult to understand? Or, what tactics do you use to communicate effectively? Let me know in the comments.

Yours, simply,

Michael

PS., while you’re here, here’s a great quote, by a great writer, about writing well:

‘But if you think about what’s going on when you read, you’re processing information at an incredible rate. One measure of how good the writing is is how little effort it requires for the reader to track what’s going on…

That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention.’

Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing (2013)

I do the hard labour of making a complex idea easy to understand, rather than making you do the hard labour of understanding my complex sentence
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