When I think of my early education in writing, nearly all of my teachers were rigid, rule-bound stylists. At that time a little book called The Elements of Style was the absolute truth for composition teachers. It was full of pithy little rules. “Use the active voice.” “Put statements in positive form.” “Avoid a succession of loose sentences.”
All of these rules for writing were intended to make writing easier, but I have always felt they did more harm than good.
The rule that did the most harm was maybe the shortest one: “Omit needless words.”
I really took this one to heart. From about my freshman year of college I had this notion that I should strive to use only and exactly the words necessary to articulate my reasoning. We might call this a “minimalist” approach to communication. I struggled with the minimalist approach for many years.
A struggling minimalist
As a young philosopher I always harbored an intense desire to identify first principles, to distill my ideas down into concise, axiomatic propositions. From these propositions, I hoped to build systems of arguments, connected frameworks of logical relationships, through which the first principles would generate useful conclusions. All along the way, I wanted to be absolutely consistent in my terminology, to keep my lines of argument as direct and clear as possible.
In this context, the advantages of brevity and clarity are numerous. A short, clear proposition is easier to comprehend. It is also easier to remember. A short list of principles is more portable than a long collection of essays; it can be written down on a little notepad, kept in a shirt pocket, memorized and retained over years with relative ease. If a writer can boil his thesis down to a short, clear proposition, it becomes easy to keep in mind and easy to communicate. Much like the pithy little rules in The Elements of Style.
Condensing my writing down to something very short was always quite natural for me. In college I had difficulty with any assignment in which the professor required a paper of a certain, specified length. It seemed to me that the subject matter should determine the natural length of the paper. Many arguments require one or two premises followed by a conclusion. Nothing more is necessary. I always had trouble with the idea of just filling up space. And yet, no matter how concise or verbose my writing, I always felt it was missing something essential.
Exactly and only what one means
Eventually I abandoned the idea of writing “exactly and only what I mean.” Writing with that level of precision is seldom possible, for two reasons.
The first is that every sentence contains multiple propositions. No sentence is atomic, discrete, or axiomatic. Every sentence carries implicit assumptions and is susceptible to multiple interpretations. Therefore it is rarely impossible to write only what one means. One can only write sentences whose main and most obvious meaning is consistent with what one wants to express.
The second reason is that, just as every sentence has multiple meanings, every meaning is capable of expression in multiple sentences. We are forced to convey our personal, particular ideas through the use of public, prefabricated words. Like clothing, the words in our language are cut to a specific size. Sometimes they’re a good fit, but other times they’re either too loose or too tight.
Suppose I tell you that I have a fountain pen with blue ink. You will have many questions. Is it plastic or metal? Is the point fine or bold? Does it have a cap or a clicker?
I should specify further: a plastic fine-point pen with a screw-cap. In which case you might ask, how clear is the plastic? Is it transparent or opaque? Just how fine is the point? Is the barrel octagonal or round?
The longer description offers a more specific picture. But there is an interesting thing about descriptions: the more detailed they are, the more words they contain, the greater the opportunities for variation. No two writers will describe the same object in the same way. And a pen is a relatively simple, mundane object. Introduce a more abstract idea, and you have many possibilities for variation.
Consider even the classic proposition, “All men are mortal,” which is about as axiomatic as sentences come, and yet it can be expressed in so many different ways. Every man is mortal. All humans are mortal. All men die. Every man’s life will end. Each rephrasing overlaps with the others and yet subtly carries its own unique meaning.
Every written work implies some propositions that the author did not mean. Every written work fails to express some propositions that the author meant. There are many ways to say any given thing, and many ways to misconstrue whatever was said.
The price of clarity
In trying to pare writing down to the minimum, we lose detail and specificity. In losing detail and specificity, we increase abstraction and generality and drain the writing of meaning. We progress farther and farther into a realm where we can say nothing of significance.
Brevity and clarity can often be attained only at the expense of oversimplification, of glossing over the variety and complexity of the subject matter. This is an extremely high price to pay, because the world is a complex place, and the only way to understand it, to the extent that one can, is to grapple with the full immensity and richness of real experience. Distilling our ideas into brief and clear statements is a useful means of collecting the most essential information we can find, but it requires sacrificing everything beyond the scope of our simplified system. That is how ideologies are made.
The cost is also one of emotion. The choice to write in short sentences is the choice to write in a certain voice. Short sentences are matter-of-fact. They are sometimes clinical, sometimes curt, sometimes brutal. They rarely convey compassion.
Prose written in long sentences does not treat its subject matter as something reducible to concise principles, to propositions that can be arranged, like building blocks, into an intellectual edifice. Instead it revels in the lushness and abundance of information and detail, the thrill and pleasure of intellectual inquiry, and it draws the reader into the flow of ideas and better showcases the many features of the terrain it describes.
Too deductive
My problem with writing was a larger problem of communicating, set within an even wider issue of reasoning. My approach to knowledge was too deductive.
A written work is not the same as a logical syllogism. It does not merely lay out premises assumed as true and the conclusion that necessarily follows. Most readers sit down with a written work in the hope of learning something new, of gaining knowledge and insight they did not previously possess. So much writing, whether narration or dialogue or analysis or argument, is legitimately, and most fundamentally, description.
A long written work may begin with a small kernel of meaning. That kernel becomes the seed from which grows an entire tree, maybe a whole forest. This process of growth, however, necessarily does some violence to the original seed, which is hard, compact, and small, and must break open and unfurl and produce something much larger. The simple beauty of the syllogism gives way to the elegant grace of the essay, the grandeur of a treatise or a series. We can still marvel at the clean simplicity of the original, but we can never see it as simple again.
How to achieve clarity
I came to a new understanding of how to write through a different hobby: computer programming. I have a large, long-term programming project that I have been working on for years. I have revised and expanded virtually every aspect of it. I have built whole new wings and have deleted others. I have refactored my code so many times, and so extensively, that it has become almost unrecognizable in relation to its earlier forms.
And what has this taught me about writing? You make progress by iteration. You start simple, build on your previous work. There is no shame in refactoring and revising.
In the past I was always somewhat embarrassed when I found myself revising a lot. I believed that the truth should be simple and plainly stated. Write it once and without effort and perfectly.
But the truth is rarely simple, and it cannot be plainly stated absent oversimplification. Plain speech obscures as well as it reveals.
At the top of my notebook on writing there is still a list of axioms. Pithy little phrases like: Diction is the soul of writing. Meaning under-determines text. Writing is never finished, only abandoned.
One of those axioms reads: Clarity in writing is easy to achieve. Oversimplify.