Writing is one of my favorite pastimes. I certainly would not presume to be proficient enough to write professionally, even so, I love to put my thoughts, opinions and ideas down on paper. If for no other reason, my writing serves as a form of self-therapy or self-discovery. When I find myself in the midst of an emotional mental wrestling match, I can always try to put my thoughts and feelings onto paper. By organizing my arguments, I can usually work out a resolution with the author.
Although I do not anticipate ever having the skill to write professionally and to earn an honest income from it, I love to study writing techniques. I read books that help amateurs, such as myself, fine tune the art and craftsmanship of writing.
Through my investigations, I have discovered a glaring imperfection with my writing. Now, I could simply pass it off as being my particular style of writing, or as the result of my inexperience and lack of training. I openly admit to being a beginner in this pursuit. I could even further defend myself, and my delicate ego, by proclaiming that I am not the only violator of this crime. I of course refer to the damnable offense of written clutter.
There is no doubt that clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
It is a very small minority that can understand the viscous language of everyday American commerce and enterprise. We do not need to go far for examples. Examine the common business letter, interoffice memo, corporation report, or notice from the bank explaining its latest "simplified" statement. What member of an Insurance or medical plan can decipher the brochure that describes what the costs and benefits are? What parent can put together a child's toy from the instructions in the box? Who can utilize all the features of a recent software upgrade by reading the manual? Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airplane pilot who announces that he is "presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation" would not dream of saying that it may rain. The sentence is too simple-there must be something wrong with it.
However, the secret of good writing, I am told, is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Rip out every word that serves no function or long words that could be short words. Strip every adverb that carries the same meaning that is already in the verb. Reshape every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. Ironically, they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.
During the late 1960s, the president of a major university wrote a letter to mollify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. "You are probably aware," he began, "that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related." He meant that the students had been hassling them about different things. Personally, I was troubled more by the presidents English than by the student's potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction. Franklin D. Roosevelt used a different approach when he tried to convert into English his own government's memos, such as this blackout order of 1942:
"Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination."
"Tell them," Roosevelt said, "that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows."
Simplify, simplify. Thoreau said it, and no American writer more consistently practiced what he preached. Open Walden to any page and you will find a man saying in a plain and orderly way what is on his mind:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it.
How in the world can the rest of us, amateur and professional alike, ever hope to achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? I don't know! Possibly the answer is to clear out our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can not exist without the other. It is impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. We may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there is no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily be lured back.
Who is this elusive creature, the reader? The reader is someone with an attention span of about sixty seconds-a person assailed by forces competing for the minutes that might otherwise be spent on a magazine or a book. At one time these forces were not so numerous or so possessive; newspapers, radio, spouse, home, children. Today they also include a "home entertainment center" (TV, VCR, video camera, tapes, and CDs), pets, a fitness program, a lawn and garden and all the gadgets that have been bought to keep them spruce, and that most potent of competitors, sleep. The person snoozing in a chair, holding a magazine or a book, is a person who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
It will not do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If the reader is lost, it is usually because the writer has not been careful enough. The carelessness can take any number of forms. Perhaps a sentence has been so shoddily constructed that the reader could read it in any of several ways. Perhaps the writer has switched pronouns in midsentence, or has switched tenses, so the reader loses track of who is talking or when the action took place. Perhaps Sentence B is not a logical sequel to Sentence A-the writer, in whose head the connection is clear, has not bothered to provide the missing link. Perhaps the writer has used an important word incorrectly by not taking the trouble to look it up. The writer may think that "sanguine" and "sanguinary" mean the same thing, but the difference is a bloody big one. The reader can only infer (speaking of big differences) what the writer is trying to imply.
Faced with such obstacles, readers are at first remarkably tenacious. They blame themselves-they obviously missed something, and they go back over the mystifying sentence, or over the whole paragraph, piecing it out like an ancient rune, making guesses and moving on. But they will not do this for long. The writer is making them work too hard, and they will look for one who is better at the craft.
As writers, we must therefore constantly ask: What am I trying to say? Surprisingly often we do not know. Then we must look at what we have written and ask: Have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? If it is not, that is because some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery. The clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to see this stuff for what it is: fuzz.
I do not mean that some people are born clearheaded and are therefore natural writers, whereas others are naturally fuzzy headed and will never write well. Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force upon themselves, just as if they were embarking on any other project that requires logic; adding up a laundry list or doing an algebra problem. Good writing does not come naturally, though most people obviously think it does. The professional writer is constantly being bearded by strangers who say they would like to "try a little writing sometime"-meaning when they retire from their real profession, like insurance or real estate. Or they say, "I could write a book about that." I doubt it.
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this as a consolation in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it is because it is hard. It is one of the hardest things that people do.
