Clarity Is Easy

When I think of my early education in writing, nearly all of my teachers were rigid, rule-bound stylists. Write only in the active voice. Minimize the use of the word "that." Never use a comma before an "and" that connects the final term in a series. These teachers and their rules were just trying to help, but they did more harm than good. At that time The Elements of Style by Strunk and White was the absolute truth for composition teachers.

The rule from that book that did the most harm was a simple one: omit needless words. There is a philosophy of writing, one to which I was exposed at an early age, or perhaps simply imposed on myself during my youth, which holds that we should write in a manner that uses only and exactly the words necessary to articulate our reasoning. We might call this the "minimalist" approach. I worked at mastering the minimalist approach for many years.

The minimalist

As an amateur philosopher, I have always harbored an intense desire to identify first principles, to distill my ideas down into concise, axiomatic propositions. From these propositions, I hoped to build systems of arguments, connected frameworks of logical relationships, through which my first principles could generate useful conclusions. All along the way, I wanted to be absolutely consistent in my terminology, and to keep my lines of argument as direct and clear as possible.

The advantages of brevity and clarity are numerous. A short, clear proposition is easier to comprehend. It is also easier to remember. A short list of maxims is more portable than a long collection of essays; it can be written down on a napkin or a little notepad, kept in a shirt pocket, or memorized and retained over years with relative ease. If a writer can boil his thesis down to a single sentence, he can place it on a page along with his other core propositions, and even draw arrows and diagrams to understand their relationship.

It is difficult for some people to condense their writing. I have always had the opposite problem. In college I had difficulty with any assignment in which the professor required a paper of a certain, specified length. It seemed to me that the subject matter should determine the natural length of the paper. Many arguments require one or two premises followed by a conclusion. Nothing more is necessary.

Exactly and only what I mean

I spent many years trying to write in such a manner as to express "exactly and only what I mean." I can now set that notion aside. Writing with that level of precision is impossible, for two reasons.

The first is an observation I owe to Professor Brooks Landon: each sentence contains multiple propositions. No sentence is atomic, discrete, or axiomatic. Every sentence carries implicit assumptions and is susceptible to multiple interpretations. Therefore it is impossible to write only what one means. One can only write sentences whose main and most obvious meaning is consistent with what one wants to express.

The second reason is that, just as every sentence has multiple meanings, every meaning is capable of expression in multiple sentences. We are forced to convey our personal, particular ideas through the use of public, prefabricated words. Like clothing, the words in our language are cut to a specific size. Sometimes they're a good fit, but other times they're either too loose or too tight.

Suppose I tell you that I have a plastic ballpoint pen with red ink. Is the plastic clear or opaque? Is the point fine or medium? Does the pen have a cap or a clicker? I could specify further: a clear plastic fine ballpoint with bright red ink and a cap. In which case, how clear is the plastic, translucent or transparent? How fine is the point? Is the barrel octagonal or round? The longer description offers a more specific picture. But there is an interesting thing about descriptions: the more detailed they are, the more words they contain, the greater the opportunities for variation. No two writers will describe the same object in the same way. And a pen is a relatively simple, mundane object. Introduce all the complexity of political morality and social values, and you have a rich recipe for diversity of expression.

Consider even the classic proposition, "All men are mortal," about as axiomatic as sentences come. Every man is mortal. All humans are mortal. All men die. Every man's life will end. Each rephrasing subtly alters the meaning. That does not mean the meaning is compromised. Rather, it dispels the illusion that a single sentence can adequately capture the complex meaning for which it stands.

Every written work implies some propositions that the author did not mean. Every written work fails to express some propositions that the author meant. There are many ways to say any given thing, and many ways to misconstrue whatever was said. It will be forever thus.

What brevity costs

Even worse, in trying to pare writing down to the absolute minimum, we lose detail and specificity. In losing detail and specificity, we increase abstraction and generality and drain the writing of meaning. We progress farther and farther into a realm where we can say nothing of significance.

Brevity and clarity can often be attained only at the expense of oversimplification, of glossing over the variety and complexity of the subject matter. This is an extremely high price to pay, because the world is a complex place, and the only way to understand it, to the extent that one can, is to grapple with the full immensity and richness of real experience. Distilling our ideas into brief and clear statements is a useful means of collecting the most essential information we can find, but it requires sacrificing everything beyond the scope of our simplified system. That is how ideologies are made.

The cost is also one of tone. The choice to write in short sentences is the choice to write in a certain voice. Short sentences are matter-of-fact. They are sometimes clinical, sometimes curt, sometimes brutal. They are rarely compassionate. Prose written in long sentences does not treat its subject matter as something reducible to concise principles, to propositions that can be arranged, like building blocks, into an intellectual edifice. Instead it revels in the lushness and abundance of information that abounds in all fields of human inquiry; it draws the reader into the flow of ideas; it displays the many features of the terrain, the many stages of the narrative, the multifaceted thoughts and emotions of the people it portrays.

Too deductive

My problem with writing was not so much a problem with writing itself, but a larger problem of communicating, set within an even wider issue of reasoning. My approach to knowledge has been, by far, too deductive.

A written work is not the same as a logical syllogism. It does not merely lay out premises assumed as true and the conclusion that necessarily follows. Most readers sit down with a written work in the hope of learning something new, of gaining knowledge and insight they did not previously possess. All writing, whether narration or dialogue or analysis or argument, is most fundamentally description.

A long written work may begin with a small kernel of meaning. That kernel becomes the seed from which grows an entire tree. This process of growth, however, does some violence to the original seed, which is hard, compact, and small, and must split open and unfurl to produce something much larger. The simple beauty of the syllogism gives way to the elaborate grandeur of the essay. We can still marvel at the clean simplicity of the original, but we can never see it the same way again.

Revising in public

I came to a new understanding of how to write through a different hobby: computer programming. I have a large, long-term programming project that I have been working on for years. I have revised and expanded virtually every aspect of it. I have built whole new wings and have deleted others. I have refactored my code so many times, and so extensively, that it has become almost unrecognizable in relation to its earlier forms.

And what has this taught me about writing? You learn by doing. You start simple. You build on your previous work. There is no shame in refactoring and revising. In fact, extensive revision is a sign of good writing.

It seems that in the past I have been ashamed of myself for revising a lot. There was Asimov, who was so prolific, and who did not think much of revision. There was Gandhi, who believed that the truth should be simple and plainly stated. And there is Buddhism, which just doesn't think much of the written word. I am not in agreement with Gandhi that the truth should be simple and plainly stated. The truth is rarely simple, and it cannot be plainly stated absent oversimplification. Plain speech obscures as well as it reveals. And as for Buddhism, I can only say that just as birds must use their wings to fly, human beings must use language to understand themselves and the world around them.

At the top of my notebook on writing there is still a list of axioms. Diction is the soul of writing. Meaning under-determines text, and vice versa. Writing is never finished, only abandoned.

One of those axioms reads: Clarity in writing is easy to achieve. Oversimplify.