Clarity, Part 1

Daniel Foster "Typing on a Laptop" August 29, 2014 via Flickr
Attribution non-commercial reuse

In this blog post, I will be examining four topics from Rules for Writers in regard to developing more clarity in my writing.

Parallelism

After reading this section, I began to remember some of the sentence structures that I learned about in high school English. If used sparingly (use them too much and you will seem like you're trying too hard), using complex sentence structures can make writing a lot smoother and easier to understand as it can help eliminate unnecessary articles and conjunctions etc that do not contribute more to the meaning of the sentence.

Needed Words

On the other hand, there are also times when I leave out necessary words. Sometimes if I'm not being careful, I have simply skimmed over a topic and written something that is basically unintelligible. This is in large part because when you write, you are writing down your own ideas so you know what they lead to and how they connect. Someone else reading the text you wrote probably doesn't have any of the same context you have so they may have no idea what you are talking about. Upon reflection, I really kind of turned this into a "needed words and phrases and whole ideas" sort of reflection rather than just about skipping necessary verbs etc.

Exact Words

Sometimes it really pays to use a Thesaurus. Using the exact word that best applies to what you are trying to describe can really make your writing a lot less wordy while being clearer. I think reading this section was really helpful for me because I realized that if I can't think of a word but can think of a close synonym, I can just type it into Google and probably have the word I was thinking of returned.

Appropriate Language

I think I sometimes (and also in relation to this project in particular), struggle with this section in two ways. As I know a lot about cars and how they function etc, I can easily launch into a technical explanation of precisely how something works or why something is a problem. On the other hand, usually when I'm writing, my Achilles heel is that I like to write in a conversational fun way as much as possible (as the more stilted my writing has to be, the more boring it is), often when this is not appropriate at all. So this is something I'll have to work on particularly hard.

-----

First off, I learned that using complex sentence structures is a rare thing for everyone. I guess that's not only a me problem. I could never really find someone who used it (though I did find some instances when it perhaps could have been applied).

Needed words is another thing that people often struggle with in the more indirect way that I described above where they don't fully describe an idea as they have a good idea of what they are trying to say themselves.

I found an excellent example of where an exact (a "perfect" word) could be applied however. In Michael Fischer's QRG draft, he writes:

"Regardless of opinions surrounding the tech company, Uber is thriving and aggressively expanding throughout the world, sweeping bad press under the rug as they go."

Perhaps a perfect substitution would be ruthlessly for aggressively.

Probably most encouraging was how often I read a passage or even whole drafts that used a completely appropriate voice for a QRG. I think Appropriate Language is the section in which people tend to do the best out of the four sections I chose,


Ultimately, I learned that everyone has trouble with the recommendations of the clarity readings. If people didn't have trouble with those suggestions, they wouldn't be necessary suggestions at all. Or they could be a professional writer in disguise. That is also possible.