Navigating some sentences can feel like driving through fog Understanding Clarity for Writers
A guest blog from 'USA Writer'
There was an instructor who once said she liked assignments that were written clearly, concisely and to the point. How many of us understand the meaning of clarity in regards to writing?
Writing can be great fun, but your reader has to understand what you’re trying to convey; beyond saying how you feel, you have to find a way to explain how you got those impressions. While there are automated ‘readability checkers’, they can blind us to the fact that it is really all about our choice of words.
So many sentences make us work too hard because we have to sort them out and mentally reassemble them. Those are the kinds of sentences that contain too many abstract nouns. You can simply revise abstract nouns into verbs - expressing actions - and make the actors the subjects of those verbs, rearranging them into a chronological sequence.
Sentences also tend to confuse people because the writer uses words that fall into abstractions or split sentences. When the writer uses words that most of us don’t understand, we become baffled. The sentence might be clear to the writer because she /he know the field they are writing about. Writers owe it to their readers to try to anticipate both their vocabulary and their knowledge of the subject.
Here is an example of a poorly constructed sentence:
“The United States, so that it could expand and widen its influence and importance among Middle Eastern nations, in 2007 began in a quietly orchestrated way a diplomatic offensive directed at Iraq.”
The writer used too many abstract nouns, lost the actors somewhere in the sentence, and confused the chronological order of the sequence of events. The writer separated parts of the sentence that could have been kept together by using too many words.
This is how it could have been written:
“In 2007, the United States orchestrated a quiet diplomatic offensive against Iraq to expand its influence over the Middle East.”
As an exercise, I suggest going back to some of your own, earlier work and ask yourself “Was I really writing with clarity and to the point?" It can be a sobering experience.
Click to read all Writer's Tips Blog posts
A guest blog from 'USA Writer'
There was an instructor who once said she liked assignments that were written clearly, concisely and to the point. How many of us understand the meaning of clarity in regards to writing?
Writing can be great fun, but your reader has to understand what you’re trying to convey; beyond saying how you feel, you have to find a way to explain how you got those impressions. While there are automated ‘readability checkers’, they can blind us to the fact that it is really all about our choice of words.
So many sentences make us work too hard because we have to sort them out and mentally reassemble them. Those are the kinds of sentences that contain too many abstract nouns. You can simply revise abstract nouns into verbs - expressing actions - and make the actors the subjects of those verbs, rearranging them into a chronological sequence.
Sentences also tend to confuse people because the writer uses words that fall into abstractions or split sentences. When the writer uses words that most of us don’t understand, we become baffled. The sentence might be clear to the writer because she /he know the field they are writing about. Writers owe it to their readers to try to anticipate both their vocabulary and their knowledge of the subject.
Here is an example of a poorly constructed sentence:
“The United States, so that it could expand and widen its influence and importance among Middle Eastern nations, in 2007 began in a quietly orchestrated way a diplomatic offensive directed at Iraq.”
The writer used too many abstract nouns, lost the actors somewhere in the sentence, and confused the chronological order of the sequence of events. The writer separated parts of the sentence that could have been kept together by using too many words.
This is how it could have been written:
“In 2007, the United States orchestrated a quiet diplomatic offensive against Iraq to expand its influence over the Middle East.”
As an exercise, I suggest going back to some of your own, earlier work and ask yourself “Was I really writing with clarity and to the point?" It can be a sobering experience.
Click to read all Writer's Tips Blog posts