You don’t need flowery language to write well

A lot of people seem to think that in order to be a good writer, you need to have a mental dictionary akin to an entire set of Oxford English Dictionaries. While it’s certainly true that having access to just the right 10-cent word at just the right occasion can be an invaluable tool, elusive multi-syllabic terminology is certainly not the only way to demonstrate linguistic prowess (like this).

Think of arguably the most famous guide to writing ever, Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style*. The entire ideology of Strunk & White revolves around using simple sentence structures and words to express ideas, without unduly complicating what you’re trying to communicate. 

“Omit needless words!” shouts Strunk, E.B. White’s English professor at Cornell. That, in a nutshell, is pretty much the core message of TEOS writing theory.

I think it’s a lesson that writers can take away now as much as they did then. And if you’re going to say, “Hey! That’s like Twitter,” stop before I smack you. What Strunk & White are getting at is not brevity, but clarity.

So let’s talk about clarity. How exactly do you achieve it?

Let’s start basic, with a simple sentence.

Now just on first glimpse, without actually reading them, which sentence below looks like one you’d rather read?:

The postprandial sky was shrouded in ebony punctuated by torrents of precipitation, ominous clouds, and howling currents of air.

It was a dark and stormy night.

The reason the opening line of Moby Dick has remained iconic is because it so simply describes the setting without wasting words. Whereas the first sentence’s overexplaining raises more questions than it answers (and of course, liberally interprets Herman Melville’s original vision of his opening scene). For example, why did the writer focus on these aspects of the storm, and did they miss any other relevant details? When exactly is this scene taking place: late afternoon, evening, or late evening? And if postprandial, was there dinner involved?!

You can apply the same idea of clarity to more complex sentences. In a sentence that requires many asides, it’s easy to bog the reader down with excessive commas, semicolons, dashes, and whatever tools you might deem necessary to keep your clauses separated. For example:

In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.

Of course, this sentence is unusually long (especially for E.B. White!) and clearly is written that way to achieve a certain emotional effect. But for a string of a whopping 107 words it’s remarkably well organized. There is a clear beginning with the dependent clause (basically, an incomplete thought): “In the loveliest town of all.” There is a clear end, where the central action of the sentence takes place: “Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.” The long aside, which describes the loveliest of towns, is conveniently sandwiched between these two main parts of the sentence and further set apart with commas: before “where the houses were white” and after “toward the wonderful wide sky”. And just in case the reader lost their train of thought while wading through this aside, White reiterates the beginning of the sentence in his conclusion: “in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”

Also note that the most difficult term in this passage is “sarsaparilla.” But never fear! White conveniently informs us that this is “a drink”.

Whereas Mrs. Dalloway can be a right nightmare to read:

It was not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush) the liberator of the pent egotism, which is a strong martial woman, well nourished, well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and little introspective power (broad and simple–why could not every one be broad and simple? she asked) feels rise within her, once youth is past, and must eject upon some object–it may be Emigration, it may be Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object round which the essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous, half looking glass, half precious stone; now carefully hidden in case people should sneer at it; now proudly displayed.

Humble apologies to Virginia Woolf for the artless and callous rewrite, but isn’t this just a tad easier to follow?:

It was not to Hugh, Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush, that the liberator of the pent egotism feels rise within her, once youth is past, and must eject upon some object. Pent egotism is a strong martial woman — well nourished, well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and little introspective power broad and simple. (Why could not every one be broad and simple? she asked.) That object may be Emigration or Emancipation. Whatever it be, this object round which the essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic and lustrous, half looking glass and half precious stone. It is now carefully hidden in case people should sneer at it, now proudly displayed.

Of course, writing shouldn’t be entirely about the reader, and a writer has every right to stay true to his or her own self on the page. But I urge you to still try and think about how your sentences communicate themselves to your audience. Chances are, you might even clarify your own ideas for your own self!

* * * * *

*I will say that it seems to me the writing touted in Strunk & White is more relevant to American-style writing than British. More on this later.