Making your writing as clear as possible is one of the highest aims that a writer can strive towards. The world is filled with vague, ill-considered, uninformative writing, and you shouldn’t add to it. Whether your aim is to entertain or inform, there are ways of going about it that make your message easier to understand. Doing so will give you an appreciative audience, regardless of your intent.
The chief lesson in crystal-clear writing is making sure that you have a definite, chief aim. Setting out to write something without a goal in mind is fine for self-discovery, but not so if you want to show your final piece to an audience. Meandering through writing will lead to waffle and filler, both killers to elegance and cohesion.
Giving yourself an aim – even a generalised one, like “Tell the story of my 16th birthday” or “Explain this new IT system to mid-level managers” – will keep you focussed and on track. It will stop you wandering, because you will be able to repeatedly glance across at your goal and go “Is this sentence, this paragraph, truly serving my aim? Or is it here because I’m unsure how to proceed?”
Your writing need not be plain or to move directly from supposition to exploration to conclusion. One of the joys of good writing is that you can explore ideas, show us tangents, and provoke more questions than you have space to answer. A sign of a good writer is to be able to do this deftly and confidently, while still leading us to some satisfaction at the end of the piece.
What I would encourage you to do, however, is keep thinking about what you’re writing and whether it corresponds with the overall influence you want your writing to have. If it doesn’t, then carefully consider cutting it or refining it further.
When I write a story, my words are limited. Regardless of the format of the story, be it a short story, a novella or a full-blown novel, each word is extremely precious. Wasting them is a crime, and even if I’m heading off on a side-path, a diversion of colour and flavour, I make sure that my main goals are being supported in some way.
Strive to combine utility and beauty in your writing. This means editing, revision, and consideration. It means letting yourself be loose and free, and then alternately tightly controlled and calculating, when each approach is demanded. The skill to switch between two modes, or extremes, comes with conscious, aware practise.
‘Keeping your goal in mind’ is a broad piece of advice. What mechanical techniques can you apply to your writing process to make this easier? The first is controlling the flow of your writing. Consider what would happen if you read your piece aloud. Would it make a pleasing rhythm? Would the sentences flow well from the mouth through the air to the ear? Would it be enjoyable to listen to? A dissonance or disharmony indicates that there are some edits to be carried out on your piece.
Do you waffle? I know that when I write, especially something that I’m passionate about, I tend to go into more depth than is strictly necessary. How interested and captive is your audience? If they’ve picked up a book on how to write, or have Googled articles on clear writing, then I imagine they’ll forgive me occasional lapses of brevity in order to glean usefulness from my writing. If I’m giving a speech to a disinterested bunch of Fifth-graders, who are only waiting on me to finish to go to recess, then I shall have to be deliberately succinct and engaging.
Modifying your writing to suit your audience is another skill that is hard to prescribe precisely, yet worth developing. constantly consider the point of view of not only yourself as an author – who is approaching the words with perfect knowledge and the scene already set in one’s mind – with that of the reader, who is visiting your words perhaps only once and from a picture of perfect innocence. How are your words treating a newcomer? With excitement and welcome, or with warm familiarity?
Don’t mistake brevity for clarity. The two are often used synonymously, but this is not the case. Complex ideas and thoughts need and deserve appropriate time spent on them. you would not introduce calculus to High-schoolers in one ten-minute lesson and then move onto something else. No, you would walk them through the history and theory, you would provide examples, you would work through problems, and then you would move on when the subject became familiar.
It takes us time to absorb new information. That time can be spent continuing to read, but a barrage of new and intense images, paragraph after paragraph, can be fatiguing and overwhelming. Imagine if you were processing all the information for the first time.
Please remember that when I say ‘information’, I can be talking about anything from material facts to the ideas contained in a fantasy novel. New places, magical systems, languages, cultures, mechanics and experiences can be just as intense for one’s brain and imagination to swallow as calculations, equations, scientific and engineering principles and the like. Imagine trying to learn how to drive a new sort of car every time you wanted to travel down a road. your brain would overload in very little time at all!
The limitations of space prevent me from going further into specifics. But hopefully there’s been something here to provoke some introspection. Look over your writing with an intelligent eye. Consider it from multiple perspectives. Tailor yourself, and bridle your enthusiasm for language with compassion for your readers.
