I’m sure you all have seen positive comments about your writing
using words like--clear, direct, concise, flowing, readable, etc. You may
have also run into some negative ones such as unclear, wordy, confusing,
awkward, tangled, inflated, etc. Consider the examples below:
1) Our lack of data prevented evaluation of committee actions in targeting funds to areas in greatest need of assistance.
2) Because we lacked data, we could not evaluate whether the committee had targeted funds to areas that needed assistance the most.
Most people would call 1 indirect and awkward and 2 clearer and more direct. When we make comments like this, we are actually attempting to articulate how we feel about those sentences. We might even go so far as to say that sentence 2 is more comfortable to us as readers. But why is that? The answer seems to be bound up in the way these two sentences use subjects and verbs.
Our lives are constructed from stories; from the time we could first comprehend language, we have listened to stories. Stories need both characters and actions, and the way these two elements relate to each other creates or breaks down what we might call the clarity of the story. Consider these sentences:
1) An explanation of the causes of the war appears in the third paragraph of the Gettysburg Address, while the fourth expresses encouragement in the continuation of the struggle.
2) In the third paragraph of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln explains what caused the war, and in the fourth he encourages his audience to continue the struggle.
In the first sentence, the characters are hidden from us (Lincoln and his audience), but in the second, they are present and doing something. Therefore, that sentence seems clearer and more direct. The subjects are characters who perform actions in the clearer version; they are not hidden or omitted and the subjects of the verbs are not abstractions.
There seems to be two principles to keep in mind as you try to keep your prose clear.
1) We expect to see central characters in most subjects.
2) We expect to see their important actions in most verbs.
The most important characters are the sources of the actions. Look
at the differences between the doers in our first examples.
1) Our lack of pertinent data prevented evaluation of committee actions in targeting funds to areas in greatest need of assistance.
2) Because we lacked pertinent data, we could not evaluate whether the committee had targeted funds to areas that needed assistance the most.
The second sentence has succeeded in rescuing the principle characters
from the abstract phrases that they were lost in. Instead of having the
subject be lack (our lack of pertinent data), we now have we as a subject,
and we is the logical performer of the action (to lack).
Similarly, committee is now the direct performer of the action to target.
Sentences usually become clearer when their principle actions are
expressed in the verbs. The sentence below seems to get progressively clearer
as the verbs express more specific actions.
There has been the effective exercise of information dissemination control on the part of the Secretary.
The secretary has exercised effective staff information dissemination control.
The Secretary has effectively controlled how his staff disseminates information.
The crucial actions are not be or exercise, but control and disseminate.
Writers of abstract prose typically use verbs to state only that an action
exists but not directly what that action is.
Obviously, there will be times when you will want to bend these guidelines
as a matter of choice. However, it is typically better to keep your prose
as direct and clear as possible. Remember, just because you have complex
ideas you don’t have to place them inside sentences that are indirect or
cloudy.