You’d like to think your education has carried you well past short sentences.
verlyn Klinkenborg, several short sentences about writing, page 5
But you’ve been delivered into a wilderness of false assumptions and bad habits,
A desert of jargon and weak constructions, a land of linguistic barbarism,*
A place where it’s nearly impossible to write with clarity or directness,
Without clichés or meaningless phrases.
True, you can sound quite grown-up, quite authoritative, in the manner of college professors and journalists and experts in every field.
(You may be a college professor, a journalist, or an expert in some field.)
How well do they write?
How much do you enjoy reading them?
At the end of a meeting with my PhD advisor, she told me her plan for the afternoon. She would force herself to read a scholarly book that was key for her research, using the Pomodoro technique to keep herself on task. Though the book was on a topic my advisor was passionate about (and was written by an established, respected scholar), she dreaded pushing herself through the dense weeds of the writing.
What texts by experts do you enjoy reading?
…
Our scholarship often speaks to an incredibly narrow audience. It is tragic to labor over research for years and find ourselves alone in the desert, failing to reach even the handful of people that have also dedicated careers to thinking about similar things.
What ideas are worth communicating to non-experts?
…
I’ve spent time this morning editing a client’s work for directness, cutting all the unnecessary qualifications. Down with: might, may, suggest, arguably, perhaps, one could say! Dare you say it outright, without softening the claim?
Have you ever found yourself in a place where it is impossible to write with clarity and directness?
It is not only jargon, cliché, and bad writing habits that interfere with clarity and directness. Directness requires courage–the courage to take a stand, to commit oneself to a claim, to reveal oneself to others by saying what you think. Extra courage is required when your audience is primed to disagree, criticize, and object.
Writing is Thinking sentence makeovers transform sentences by targeting weak constructions and meaningless phrases.
The Writing is Thinking approach can also transform writers. What happens if you trade the comforting authority of jargon for the risk of staking a clear, direct claim? Do you use weak construction and an overabundance of modifiers to fend off anticipated attacks from your reader? (What if your reader was not crouched to pounce on you but just mildly interested?)
Perhaps your education has not carried you past the need for an editor but delivered you into a wilderness that an editor can map for you, blazing trails that bring you back into community with your reader.
Perhaps your education has not carried you past the need for an editor
Writing is Thinking.com
But delivered you into a wilderness that an editor can map for you,
Blazing trails that bring you back into community
With your reader.
*Wikipedia tells us, “A barbarism is a nonstandard word, expression or pronunciation in a language, particularly one regarded as an error in morphology,” and perhaps Klinkenborg is imagining using words like “comestible sensation” instead of “taste.” But I’m ready to ditch this use of “barbarism” to err on the side of justice, given our history of considering people of color as barbaric and their language use as improper (not to mention our present failures to meaningfully break with this history). At Writing is Thinking, I tackle correct language use within the context of academic and nonfiction writing–but outside these genres, I want no part in policing the incredible things we can do with nonstandard language use.