How to Improve The Clarity Of Your Writing
Clarity in writing is difficult to define. We usually recognise it when we read something. We understand what the author wants to say and enjoy how she does it. But have you noticed how hard it is to improve it in your own writing? There are tools out there to help, Hemingway App, ProWriting Aid and many more. We can work on sticky sentences, length and other easy-to-define aspects and the writing does improve after this editing. Yet the feeling that we loose the liveliness of our language and put gummy sentences on the paper or screen remains.
In this post, I’ll look at Clarity, the second chapter of the book Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams. Our discussion will center on principles of good writing, show how to improve the writing flow by eliminating unnecessary nominalizations and provide advice on choosing between active and passive constructions.
The First Two Principles of Clear Writing
Readers are likely to feel that they are reading prose that is clear and direct when:
- the subjects of the sentences name the cast of characters, and
- the verbs that go with those subjects name the crucial actions those characters are part of.
Original sentence: Our lack of knowledge about local conditions precluded determination of committee action effectiveness in fund allocation to those areas in greatest need of assistance.
Revised sentence: Because we knew nothing about local conditions, we could not determine how effectively the committee had allocated funds to areas that most needed assistance.
Consider how those two sentences name the actions those characters perform. In the first, the actions are not verbs, but rather abstract nouns: lack, knowledge, determination, action, allocation, assistance, need. The second consistently names those actions in verbs: we knew nothing, we could not determine, the committee allocated, areas needed.
Advice about revising: When your prose feels turgid, abstract, too complex, do two things. First, locate the cast of characters and the actions that those characters perform (or are the objects of). If you find that those characters are not subjects and their actions are not verbs, revise so that they are.
And a quick method: Simply to run a line under the first five or six words of every sentence. If you find that (1) you have to go more than six or seven words into a sentence to get past the subject to the verb and (2) the subject of the sentence is not one of your characters, take a hard look at that sentence; its characters and actions probably do not align with subjects and verbs. Then simply revise the sentence so that characters appear as subjects and their actions as verbs.
A sentence that feels wrong:
The argument that failure to provide for preservation of the royalty rate upon expiration of the patent discouraged challenges to the contract does not apply here.
We have 15 words between the subject and the verb. The subject of the verb, the argument, is not a character and so characters and actions do not align with subjects and verbs. Let’s revise it (we will have to invent characters because we do not know the context).
Haris argues that the argument that not preserving the royalty rate upon expiration of the patent, discourages challenges to the contract, does not apply here.
This is a little more clear but we can make it better. Let’s work on the second part of the sentence starting with “that not preserving”. I came up with a number of versions but here is what the book suggests as one possible revision.
Harris argues that when Smith gave him no way to preserve the royalty rate when the patent expired, Smith discouraged him from challenging their contract. But that argument does not apply here.
Some readers may think that the book is simply giving the standard advice about avoiding passive verbs. But the “bad” examples do not have passive verbs.
The “bad” examples “feel” passive, but that feeling does not arise from passive verbs but rather from abstract nouns and missing characters.
Extra Stylistic Benefits
• You may have been told to write more specifically, more concretely .
When we turn verbs into nouns and then delete the characters, we fill a sentence with abstraction: There has been an affirmative decision for program termination.
When we use subjects to name characters and verbs to name their actions, we write sentences that are specific and concrete: The Director decided to terminate the program.
• You may have been told to avoid using too many prepositional phrases.
An evaluation of the program by us will allow greater efficiency in service to clients.
When we use verbs instead of abstract nouns, we can also eliminate most of the prepositional phrases: We will evaluate the program so that we can serve clients better.
• You may have been told to put your ideas in a logical order.
When we turn verbs into nouns and then string them through prepositional phrases, we can confuse the logical sequence of the actions. This series of actions distorts the “real” chronological sequence: The closure of the branch and the transfer of its business and nonunionized employees constituted an unfair labor practice because the purpose of obtaining an economic benefit by means of discouraging unionization motivated the closure and transfer.
When we use subjects to name characters and verbs to name their actions, we are more likely to match our syntax to the logic of our story: The partners committed an unfair labor practice when they closed the branch and transferred its business and nonunionized employees in order to discourage unionization and thereby obtain an economic benefit.
• You may have been told to use connectors to clarify logical relationships:
The more effective presentation of needs by other Agencies resulted in our failure in acquiring federal funds, despite intensive lobbying efforts on our part.
When you turn nouns into verbs, you have to use logical operators like because, although, and if to link the new sequences of clauses.
Although we lobbied Congress intensively, we could not acquire federal funds because other interests presented their needs more effectively.
• You may have been told to write short sentences.
And once agains, this advise does not aim for shortening sentences.
What counts is not the number of words in a sentence, but how easily we get from beginning to end while understanding everything in between.
But when we have a long and confusing sentence, it is not easy to choose which character from among many to make the subject and which action to make the verb. Let’s examine these questions in the next section.
Subjects and Characters
There are many kinds of characters. The most important are agents, the direct source of an action or condition. There are collective agents:
Faculties of national eminence do not always teach well.
secondary or remote agents:
Mayor Daley built Chicago into a giant among cities.
and even figurative agents that stand for the real agents:
The White House announced today the President’s schedule.
In some sentences, we use subjects to name things that are really the means, the instrument by which some unstated agent performs an action, making the instrument seem like the agent of that action.
Studies of coal production reveal these figures.
Some characters do not appear in a sentence at all, so that when we revise, we have to supply them:
In the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address there is a rallying cry for the continuation of the struggle.
In other sentences, the writer may imply a character in an adjective:
Determination of policy occurs at the presidential level.
Which means: The President determines policy.
And in some cases, the characters and their actions are so far removed from the surface of a sentence that if we want to be explicit, we have to recast the sentence entirely.
There seems to be no obvious reason that would account for the apparent unavailability of evidence relevant to the failure of this problem to yield to standard solutions.
Revised: I do not know why my staff cannot find evidence to explain why we haven’t been able to solve this problem in the ways we have before.
Most often, though, characters in abstract prose modify one of those abstract nouns or are objects of prepositions such as by, of, on the part of:
The Federalists’ belief that the instability of government was a consequence of popular democracy was based on their belief in the tendency on the part offactions to further their self-interest at the expense of the common good.
Revised: The Federalists believed that popular democracy destabilized government because they believed that factions tended to further their self-interest at the expense of the common good.
Often, we have to supply indefinite subjects, because the sentence expresses a general statement:
Such multivariate strategies may be of more use in understanding the genetic factors which contribute to vulnerability to psychiatric disorders than strategies based on the assumption that the presence or absence of psychopathology is dependent on a major gene or than strategies in which a single biological variable is studied.
Revised: If we/one/researchers are to understand the genetic factors that make some patients vulnerable to psychiatric disorders, we/one/ researchers should use multivariate strategies rather than strategies in which wet one/ researchers study only a single biological variable.
Verbs and Actions
Most writers of turgid prose typically use a verb not to express action but merely to state that an action exists.
A need exists for greater candidate selection efficiency.
Revised: We must select candidates more efficiently.
There is a technical term for a noun derived from a verb or an adjective.Jt is called a nominalization.
Useless nominalizations:
1. When the nominalization follows a verb, with little specific meaning, change the nominalization to a verb that can replace the empty verb.
The police conducted an investigation into the matter.
The police investigated the matter.
2. When the nominalization follows there is or there are, change the nominalization to a verb and find a subject:
There is a need for further study of this program.
3. When the nominalization is the subject of an empty verb, change the nominalization to a verb and find a new subject:
The intention of the IRS is to audit the records of the program.
The IRS intends to audit the records of the program.
4. When you find consecutive nominalizations, turn the first one into a verb. Then either leave the second or turn it into a verb in a clause beginning with how or why:
There was first a review of the evolution of the dorsal fin.
First, she reviewed the evolution of the dorsal fin.
First, she reviewed how the dorsal fin evolved.
5. We have to revise more extensively when a nominalization in a subject is linked to a second nominalization in the predicate by a verb or phrase that logically connects them:
Their cessation of hostilities was because of their personnel losses.
To revise such sentences,
a. Change abstractions to verbs: cessation — cease, loss lose.
b. Find subjects for those verbs: they ceased, they lost.
c. Link the new clauses with a word that expresses their logical connection. That connection will typically be some kind of causal relationship:
They ceased hostilities because they lost personnel.
Useful nominalisations:
1. The nominalization is a subject referring to a previous sentence:
These arguments all depend on a single unproven claim.
2. The nominalization names what would be the object of its verb:
I do not understand either her meaning or his intention.
3. A succinct nominalization can replace an awkward “The fact that”:
My denial of his accusations impressed the jury.
4. Some nominalizations refer to an often repeated concept. Rather than repeatedly spell out a familiar concept in a full clause, we contract it into a noun.
Few issues have so divided Americans as abortion on demand.
And, of course, some nominalizations refer to ideas that we can express only in nominalizations: freedom, death, love, hope, life, wisdom.
5. We often use a nominalization after there is/are to introduce a topic that we develop in subsequent sentences (as distinct from an isolated there is + nominalization):
There is no need, then, for argument about the existence, the inevitability, and the desirability of change [in language]. There is need, however, for argument about the existence of such’a thing as good English and correct English.
6. And sometimes our topic seems so abstract that we think we can write about it only in nominalizations.
Recovery in equity does not require strict compliance with statutory requirements.
We see that we can improve our style by avoiding unnecessary nominalisations. We know that we should avoid passive verbs, too. As we have seen not all nominalisations are useless, is that also true for passive constructions?
Choosing Between Passive and Active
To choose between the active and the passive, we have to answer two quiestions:
First, must our audience know who is performing the action?
Second, are we maintaining a logically consistent string of subjects?
Third, if the string of subjects is consistent, is it the right string of subjects?
Often, we avoid stating who is responsible for an action and the passive is the natural and correct choice:
Those who are found guilty of murder can be executed.
The second consideration is more complex: it is whether the subjects in a sequence of sentences are consistent.
Let’s compare these sentences:
It was found that data concerning energy resources allocated to the states were not obtained. This action is needed so that a determination of redirection is permitted on a timely basis when weather conditions change. A system must be established so that data on weather conditions and fuel consumption may be gathered on a regular basis.
We found that the Department of Energy did not obtain data about energy resources that Federal offices were allocating to the states. The Department needs these data so that it can determine how to redirect these resources when conditions change. The Secretary of the Department must establish a system so that his office can gather data on weather conditions and fuel consumption on a regular basis.
In the first version, the subjects of the passive sentences (italicized) seem to be chosen almost at random. In the second, the active sentences give the reader a consistent point of view; the writer “stages” the sentences from a consistent string of subjects, in this case the agents of the action. Each agent-subject anchors the reader in something familiar at the beginning of the sentence — the cast of characters — before the reader moves on to something new.
Advice: If in a series of passive sentences, you find yourself shifting from one unrelated subject to another, try rewriting those sentences in the active voice. Use the beginning of your sentence to orient your reader to what follows.
Instititional Passive and Metadiscourse
Passive is used in institutional and scholarly writing. But scholarly writers use the first person, too. They use I or we in introductions, where they announce their intentions in metadiscourse: We claim that, We shall show. If writers use metadiscourse at the beginning of a piece, they often use it again at the end, when they review what they have done: We have suggested, I have shown that. Less often, scholarly writers use the first person to refer to their most general actions involved in researching their problem. This is not metadiscourse when it applies to the acts of research: we investigate, study. Academic and scientific writers rarely use the first person when they refer to particular actions. We are unlikely to find passages such as this: To determine if monokines directly elicited an adrenal steroidogenic response, I added monocyte-conditioned medium and purified preparations of . . .
Noun + Noun + Noun
A last habit of style that often keep us from making the connections between our ideas explicit is the unnecessarily long compound noun phrase:
Early childhood thought disorder misdiagnosis often occurs because of unfamiliarity with recent research literature describing such conditions.
This is justified in some cases. If a writer must refer several times in an article to the idea behind medication maintenance level evaluation procedures, then repeating that phrase is marginally better than repeating procedures to evaluate ways to maintain levels of medication.
Advice: So, whenever you find in your writing a string of nouns that you have never read before and that you probably will not use again, try disassembling them. Start from the last and reverse their order, even linking them with prepositional phrases, if necessary. If one of the nouns is a nominalization, change it into a verb.
Conclusion
As we read a sentence, we have to integrate two levels of its structure: one is its predictable grammatical sequence: Subject + Verb + Complement. The other level is its story, a level of meaning whose parts have no fixed order: Characters + Actions.
To the degree that we consistently expresses the crucial actions of our story in verbs and our central characters (real or abstract) in subjects, our readers are likely to feel our prose is clear and direct.
This, however, is only the first step toward clear, direct, and coherent writing. The next chapter is about Cohesion. Follow me in my learning of Style, Toward Clarity and Grace.
