Get the message?
5 ways to make your writing clearer
by Sara Messelaar (@SaraMess) — this is a crosspost with the DailyThemes Blog
The devil is in the details. Getting just one bit of a message wrong — missing one piece of information, skipping one step, (mis)translating one word — can cause everything to unravel. In 1889, a mistranslation of a single verb in the Treaty of Wuchale lead to a war between Italy and Ethiopia. One hundred years later, in 1989, Gunter Schabowski’s announcement that Communist East German government would “immediately” begin permitting citizens to visit the West — bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall — was a misinterpretation of a note handed to him only minutes before. Ten years after that, in 1998, the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated because project engineers failed to communicate which measurement standards they used, and so not all engineers converted their measurements into the metric system.
We rely on language to convey information, negotiate team work, and navigate relationships. It is a primary vehicle for change, growth, and human connection. And it is also, unfortunately, remarkably fickle. Anyone who has ever had a fight where at the end no one knows what anyone is trying to say anymore has experienced one form of language’s slipperiness. Anyone who has ever sat down with books by Hegel or Lacan has probably experienced linguistic befuddlement of another, more textual, variety.
Some miscommunications work out after all. Galileo famously sent Johannes Kepler a number of coded messages that Kepler wildly misinterpreted — yet in the end, Kepler’s wild guesses turned out to also be correct. That being said, that sort of serendipitous misunderstanding is about as rare as the two men’s respective geniuses. Misunderstandings are, by and large, counterproductive.
When we write, we want not only to be heard — we want to be understood. No author commits any idea to paper (or computer screen) and feels fully at ease with surrendering authority over their text’s meaning(s) to readers. And while writing requires us to let go and accept the limits of authority in authorship, there are a number of strategies writers can employ to make sure their point gets across. Here are a five of my favorite strategies for maximizing clarity:
1) Use strong topic and concluding sentences — and I mean really strong. Whatever you write, make it so that a reader can get a rough understanding of what you are saying by just reading the first and last sentences of each paragraph (and in longer works this applies to the first and last paragraphs of your essay or chapters of your book, etc.). Take time to read your topic and concluding sentences smoothly one after another before you submit an essay or send an email. (Reading them out loud can help as well.) These should read like bullet points outlining your argument. If your message isn’t clear from reading just those sentences, consider restructuring your work. Following this rule helps immunize your message against rapid or distracted reading. It allows you to be understood by skimmers.
2) When you need to be clear, keep your sentences simple. While varying sentence length is in general good style, in English, keeping sentences short helps keep your ideas clear. Because English grammar is so dependent on location within the sentence (and makes no use of adjective or noun declension as other languages do), longer sentences simply have more opportunities for misplaced words and phrases, called misplaced modifiers, that can change the entire meaning of your work. Put simply, a misplaced modifier is an adjective or often a prepositional phrase that could modify two different nouns in the same sentence. For example, consider the sentence: “I gave ice-cream to the children in plastic bowls.” While we can determine from the context that the ice-cream was in plastic bowls, grammatically speaking, a reader could interpret the sentence to mean that children were in plastic bowls! Another example (borrowed from one of my favorite grammar blogs) illustrates why longer sentences are more likely to cause problems:
“Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope.”
In this sentence it is unclear if Abraham Lincoln traveled on the back on an envelope or if he wrote on the back of an envelope. The longer your sentences are, the more likely it is that an adjective or phrase ends up too far from the word it actually modifies. For clarity’s sake, keep your sentences as simple as possible.
3) Banish the passive voice. The verb “to be” can be used as an efficient, crystal-clear linking verb, but it can also be symptomatic of a murkier, convoluted style: the passive voice. To banish the passive voice from your writing read what your draft and circle every time you used a form of “to be”: are, is, was, were, am, etc.. When you are done, read each sentence again and underline the subject and box the object (or something like that — squiggles and stars are good if you prefer). It’s OK if your subject and object are whole phrases. (I took two sentences from an article I was reading and did this for you to see in the picture below.) After you’re done, categorize these sentences as either OK (linking verb) or NO (passive). When you’re done, rewrite as many of the passive sentences as you can. Here’s how to locate all these parts of speech:
[a. Linking verb:] The verb “to be” can efficiently define the subject’s state of being. When it does this, it is a linking verb. You can think of this type of “is” as an equals sign. There is no movement or action in the sentence — things just are. You’ll know when you’re looking at a good form of “to be” (AKA a normal state-of-being linking verb) when an adjective, pronoun, or noun complementing the subject follows it. This is always clear and causes no misunderstandings.
[b. Passive voice:] The same cannot be said of the passive voice. In a passive sentence, the actual actor — the person or thing ‘doing’ the verb — is not the subject. You’ll know when you’re looking at a no-go form of “to be” (AKA a passive sentence) when a past participle (usually verbs ending in ‘-ed,’ but there are exceptions like “eaten”) follows “to be” as the subject’s complement. In the example from my picture, the past participle is “released.” Another telltale sign of the passive voice are phrases like “… by Susie…” that clarify the actor without making her the subject. The passive voice can be helpful. If the actor is completely irrelevant, it might be better to omit it entirely (as the journalist rightly did in my example). The passive voice is also helpful if you want to avoid assigning blame, or if you don’t know who the actor is. Usually, however, the actor is important. Most of the time when we write, who — did — what is vital. This essential information is clearest when the the sentence’s actual actor is also sentence’s grammatical subject.
4) Embrace the possessive ‘s’ and limit prepositions. Find every instance of “the X of the Y,” (for example, “the subject of the book”) and replace it with “the Y’s X,” (“the book’s subject”). See what other prepositional phrases can be simplified into adjectives or even removed. This relates back to #2: it helps keep your sentences short and active — and therefore clear.
5) Pick out one weakness to really focus on and prepare before editing. Because I work in a bilingual environment (English-German), I’ve begun mixing up comma rules. If I don’t take a minute to review English comma rules before I start editing, there is a good chance that a very German comma will end up in my should-be-English prose. (And English is my native language, not German!) Whatever your kryptonite is, take 5-10 minutes before you start editing to brush up on it and make a plan. For some people this might mean deciding for or against the Oxford comma before editing; for others it might mean reviewing the literary present or the difference between words like who and whom. This sort of consistency will help limit clarity problems.
While nothing is foolproof and these are just guidelines, these rules can help make a text easier to follow and therefore easier to understand. Simply: what matters is putting your message in center stage and letting the medium — language with all of its fickleness — fall into the background.
Catch my drift?
