Some professions are full of complex words. In a previous life, as a management consultant I got to see many of them. My first project out of college was called a: “Contract Operationalization Engagement”, which is a long title for a project in which we had to help a company enforce a contract.
This was just the top of the ice-berg, looking at the presentation you’d have found words such as: operationalize, vendor management, deliverable, and leverage. Needless to say, as a new graduate these words tend to be meaningless if you don’t have context around what they mean or why we use them.
What is clutter in writing?
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon — William Zissner, On Writing Well
Clutter is the official language used by corporations and politicians to hide their mistakes. It is also used when we want to make a piece of writing sound more sophisticated or to appeal to the “right audiences”.
Find below some headlines, and what would be their actual meaning:
A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT APPROACHES ARE BEING TRIED (We are still clueless)
MAJOR TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGH (It works only so so, but looks very hi-tech)
According to Orwell in “Politics and the English Language”: “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible”. He warned us that clutter is not just annoying to the reader but a deadly tool that has covered “civilian casualties” to “collateral damage”. It is also a tool that has converted firing employees to “right-sizing the company” or “restructuring”.
Every profession has its own type of cluttered writing. When we add complex words to our writing is like adding hurdles in a race, which slow readers down. Replacing them with simple words whenever possible lets the reader concentrate on what we’re trying to say.
Examples of Complex vs. Simple Words
Since it’s hard to make a list of all of the complex words in different fields, here’s a list of common complex words and their simple cousins.
Abstract Words vs. Simple Words
The more information readers have the better. Another way of creating clutter in your writing is by making things abstract. Here’s an example:
A broad spectrum of recovery strategies is available to aid the recovery of key systems and business activities. This can range from:
• outsourcing recovery to a third party supplier; to
• doing without certain systems activities or systems for a short time; to
• using internal resources, such as space and systems located in other, remote offices.
Abstract words can creep into the writing without adding anything to the meaning. Most times you can delete the word while preserving the meaning of the sentence. Whenever we use too many abstract words the reader has no clue what we mean.
Words such as aspect, concept, elements, facilities, inputs, operation, resources, situation, and variables are common in abstract writing.
The Bracket Technique
A tool to keep your writing simple is using imaginary brackets to revise your sentences. This tool was started in William Zissner’s writing class at Yale. In his class he would put brackets around every component of writing that’s not doing useful work. He would often just bracket unnecessary prepositions appended to a verb (“order up”), or adjectives that state known facts (“tall skyscraper”).
When you look for clutter in your writing think every word should be doing new work. Look-out for thoughts that could be expressed with more economy, or anything pompous that’s there to accommodate to your field’s customs (“heteroskedasticity” for economists and statisticians)
Look out also for qualifiers that do little for your sentences: a bit, sort of, in a sense, very, a lot.
Here are some examples of the bracket technique:
It’s [a bit of] a catch-22, [sort of], when you think about it. Do I jog [slowly] or sprint [as fast as I can] and risk injury?
Here is another example [of a sentence] from my [own] writing I [just] applied this technique to.
Once you add brackets to your sentences, you can examine whether this sentence is doing new work, or whether it’s necessary information for the reader. In his concluding remarks, Zissner says “we should be grateful for every word we throw away”
As we remove hurdles for the reader we do them and ourselves a favor. We contribute to making writing less complicated and more accessible to everyone.