Clarity is a Cruel Knife

By Brad Beals

Versitext.com

I love words. Give me a string of fat, convoluted, compound-complex sentences over stubby, simple ones any day. But 90% of my work heads to web pages, and since long sentences are harder to scan than short ones, clarity is often a cruel knife. And off they come—lovely words, hard-fought phrases and clauses, whole sentences even.

And then there’s the big-picture part of me who speaks up, and I’m reminded—clarity is good, clarity is key. And that means cutting fluff and sprinkling those long sentences with end-mark punctuation. Here, clarity is a scalpel, and, despite the pain, my text is generally healthier for it.

So clarity is good, and brevity is the soul of web-page copy. Why not stop now and call it a post?

Because not all content submits itself easily to treatment. Difficult-to-convey concepts or complex argumentation can be troublesome. When dealing with such copy, it’s easy for me to slip back into the old ways, placing no checks on sentence complexity, and paying little attention to the scanning tendency of my audience (That’s a long sentence, I know, but I’ll assume that you, as a blog reader, aren’t scanning this). And more than once I’ve heard myself asking this question: don’t we need complex phrasing to communicate complex ideas?

My answer to me: Nope. Complicated ideas should be communicated through the entirety of the text, not in the particulars of sentence complexity. This requires careful organization in the development of copy. Clear, short, active-voice sentences can do the job better than long, fat ones if they’re sequenced effectively. Because it’s within the broad sweep of the text that this kind of clarity is achieved and not in pieces, we’re less likely to be lulled into the old habit of wordiness.

In writing for the web, I’ve had to sharpen my ability to do the job quickly, at-a-glance in some ways. I’ve learned to make eye-contact, present my case, and bring things to a close in a hundred words instead of the thousand I was used to. And as my perception of good writing has changed, so have my means for achieving clarity.

My working definition for clarity is now this: a clear message is conveyed when the reader is brought safely to my conclusion. Yes, you need simple, clear sentences to do this, but you also need reasoning, logic, and the careful sequencing of all of it to help bring your reader home.

So is there no indulgence for the word junkie? None at all? No, there’s not. Not on an ecomm site, anyway. For a word-fix, go write a novel. Or better yet, a blog—it’s faster acting.

versitext Business-Language Solutions

Another Word on Words

By Brad Beals

Versitext.com

The words you use, better than any other indicator, reflect the quality of the thoughts behind them. That’s not to say good thinking can’t happen without corresponding good expression—intellectual genius often goes hand in hand with an inability to express it. But good expression rarely happens without good thinking to drive it. That is, a complicated idea, clearly expressed, indicates that complicated thinking really did happen.

A woman playing chopsticks on the piano might be a virtuoso, but she’s probably not since most people can play chopsticks and few are virtuosos. The expression of chopsticks can convey only that level of proficiency and nothing higher. And if she plays a Rogers and Hammerstein tune, we know she’s at least that good. But is that the extent of her skill? We don’t know, and we wouldn’t assume a level higher than that until we’ve heard an expression that would indicate it.

But if she does move on to playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #3, our estimation of her abilities will rise, and—now this is the important part—we will never again put her skill level at chopsticks or show tunes, even if we never hear Rachmaninoff again!

Your use of language conveys quality of thought in a similar way. Expression will convey that level of thinking, but nothing beyond. If it’s simple, you convey simplicity, which is not necessarily bad—you might just be fooling around with chopsticks. If your words are muddled, you will convey muddled thinking. And if all your expression is mundane, prosaic, plain…well, then that’s the only tune we’re hearing.

But doesn’t this contradict simplicity as doctrine for writing web copy? you ask. Doesn’t what we know about usability suggest we pound out nothing but chopsticks?

Not exactly. Even if our virtuoso prefers to play chopsticks, and even if we never hear a concerto again, her credibility at the piano is established. We know she’s good. Business writing for the web is not about entertainment—it’s about utility and credibility.

So it’s not imperative that every sentence should knock it out of the park (in fact, if you try to accomplish that, you’ll convolute your text) but that your sum-total expression does. If you give your readers a taste of Rachmaninoff early on to establish credibility, they’ll listen closely to the rest.

versitext Business-Language Solutions