Sentence Makeover: Buddhism

In today’s Writing is Thinking, short-sentence makeover, we look at a sentence from religion and philosophy, published in a MIT Press book.

The author writes:

• The interpretation according to which enlightenment/wisdom and virtue/goodness and meditation/mindfulness are the ultimate end is thought by many contemporary (but not all) Buddhists to state the ultimate end claim in a plausible and accessible manner.

This sentence, taken out of its context, has some obvious awkwardness. It uses passive voice and begins with a list of technical, slash-heavy concepts. In context, the sentence does not perform too badly. It is part of a short, well-defined chapter section about different interpretations of ultimate end of Buddhism. The technical terms—“enlightenment/wisdom,” “virtue/goodness,” and “meditation/mindfulness”—are defined in previous chapter sections. By the time the reader reaches this sentence, they have some tools for understanding it.

Yet the sentence is needlessly complex.  Revising this sentence is more about easing the reader’s experience than about clarifying the author’s ideas. The sentence is  “weak in syntactic vigor”—and simply unpleasant to read.

One useful tool for revising is to break the sentence’s clauses into their own lines:

The sentence hinges, as so many academic sentences do, on a little “is.” But the point of the sentence is clear, especially for a reader who has the benefit of its context. The new idea introduced and expressed in this sentence is the beliefs of contemporary Buddhists. The sentence’s reason for existence is obvious given where in the passage it comes.

Klinkenborg urges writers to understand the reason for every sentence’s existence. In the first page of SSSaW, he writes:

“One by one, each sentence takes the stage.
It says the very thing it comes into existence to say.
Then it leaves the stage.”

Several Short Sentences about writing, pg 3

In the previous installment of sentence makeovers, we saw an author who needed to do quite a bit of revising to recognize what his sentence came into existence to say. This sentence knows what it needs to say. My job as an editor is to get rid of all the parts of the sentence that get in the way of that task.

Here is the sentence after my revisions:

• Many, but not all, contemporary Buddhists accept the former* account of nirvana as a plausible, accessible understanding of the ultimate end of Buddhism. (*tame, naturalistic)

First, I flipped the sentence to start with the real subject of the sentence: contemporary Buddhists. The sentence is not about a particular interpretation of Buddhism (though the preceding sentences and paragraphs in the passage were). This sentence is about what contemporary Buddhists think about this interpretation. This brings us to a common problem in academic writing. How can we refer in a later sentence to a complex idea we introduced in a previous sentence? The problematic phrase in the original sentence is “the interpretation according to which enlightenment/wisdom and virtue/goodness and meditation/mindfulness are the ultimate end.”

In this case, I suggest the author refer to that interpretation as “the former account of nirvana,” since there is a clear former and latter account presented in the text. I included an asterisk with other possible word choices for the shorthand reference. These words are drawn from phrases that the author has already used to describe this account.

I’d also provide a margin note to the author to reconsider those backslashed technical terms. An earlier sentence in the chapter summed them as “living a life of wisdom, virtue, and mindfulness.” If the author ultimately decided that the sentence simply must reiterate the whole interpretation, I would encourage him to choose a simpler, briefer formulation of the idea. What work are the double terms doing that single terms could not do?

Do you trust your reader? This is what is at stake when you decide what must be included in the sentence. What can the reader reasonably be expected to retain from your previous sentences? The more direct and simple that your previous sentences are, the easier the reader can step from sentence to sentence in a leisurely, comfortable stroll.

Do you trust your reader? Can your reader trust you?