Clear and Concise: Strategies for Better Writing

With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
--Bill Watterson

​Sometimes clarity presents itself and you know just what to say to someone in a way that they understand immediately. Other times, well, you have to work at it, as Watterson suggests. Of course, we usually don't think we're trying to be unclear--we think we're communicating in the way we're expected to communicate. The irony is that the result can often be foggy.

What happens to create that fog? As with many things involving words, the answer can be complicated. The heart of the answer, though, is this: clarity depends on a meeting of the minds between the writer and the reader. In other words, it is negotiated and created out of that interaction. That means that being clear isn't totally up to the writer, and that is where things go sideways, at least initially.

Achieving clarity is difficult. Why?

• Readers don’t just “read” your prose; they interpret it
  
• They examine the prose structure to identify your/the writer’s main ideas
  
• They assemble a pattern of ideas which becomes the meaning of the sentence (for them) 
  
• They link the ideas from sentence to sentence, from paragraph to paragraph
  
• They build an understanding of what the sentence, then the paragraph, then the whole document is “about”
  

Conciseness enables clear ideas to become apparent.

Readers negotiate with writers to decide what a text means. As a writer, you may or may not have a good idea of who will read your work. It could be that your immediate audience is your supervisor at work. Then again, it could be (using this article as an example) that you don't know all that much about who is going to read your document and you have to make a series of educated guesses about them. I'm going to guess that you've got some post-secondary education, that you work in a white collar-type job, and that your job requires you to write--which is why you would read an article about clear and concise writing strategies.

How do you change your writing knowing that readers are jumping around and not sitting still and reading what you write word-for-word? Here are some of the strategies I talk about in a recent podcast:

• Link sentences from start to start
• Link sentences from end to start
• Locate the subject and the verb close to one another
• Place important ideas at the end of sentences to emphasize them
• Place one point in each syntactic structure or unit containing a subject and verb

More strategies are covered in the podcast episode and slides, including examples for each principle. If you've read this far, you might want to take a look at those documents.

Conciseness, like clarity, depends on your knowledge of your reader. If you know that your reader already knows something, that means you can skip over that topic or cover it briefly. Knowledge of your reader is the number one way to write less.

Here are four other ways to write concisely:

1. Delete meaningless words
   
2. Delete what readers can infer
   
3. Replace a phrase with a word
   
4. Use verbs rather than nominalizations to express action in sentences.
   

Again, to see examples of these principles in action, consult the slides.

When I prepared the workshop I delivered on concise writing strategies, I came across these websites that you might be interested in, too:
Purdue OWL on wordiness
APA Blog on wordiness
Plain language equivalents for wordy phrases
Grammarist on wordy phrases

Good luck with your writing. And to paraphrase Mark Twain, if I'd had more time I'd have written a shorter article!
​
Roger Graves
roger@wecanwrite.ca