Writing is thinking, whether it’s a grocery list or a philosophic treatise. The more complex the idea being expressed, the more important clarity becomes. Eggs, bread, and olive oil can be written in any order without much confusion, but something like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus must be built one layer at a time, requiring an firm understanding of each concept before moving deeper into the philosophy of language. Complexity can only be built from clear terms.
Writing is thinking. Reciting facts is not thinking. Thought gathers experience, facts, and the styles of your influences to produce a unique expression of ideas. Thinking, this combination of fact, impression, and subjective style, is a human specialty. In a series of lectures called “On the Art of Writing,” Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch reminds us, literature is an art, not a science. There are no formulas to ensure a piece of writing strikes its mark. Each piece serves a slightly different purpose, and each writer will phrase or present similar ideas in different ways. There are, however, more and less effective ways to present those ideas.
Writing is built from words. If the words you use to describe ideas are abstract and fuzzy, those ideas, at best, will be abstract and fuzzy in the mind of your reader. Clarity matters. The solution is to refine your ideas into concrete nouns -things we can touch, feel, see, hear – or examples using concrete nouns. Quiller-Couch (what a great name for a writer!) details the importance of choosing specific and concrete terms to express our thinking.
“Words are, in fine, the only currency in which we can exchange thought even with ourselves. Does it not follow, then, that the more accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to our thoughts? Does it not follow that by drilling ourselves to write perspicuously [clearly] we train our minds to clarify their thought?”
And,
“The more clearly you write the more easily and surely you will be understood.”
Demonstrating his own advice, look at the term he uses to describe words; a currency – one thing representing a value given for something else representing a value. He chooses a concrete noun we handle and use daily and, therefore, easily understand. Useful thinking requires clear and specific terms, even within our own minds. If we can’t put something into words in our own minds, it’s because we don’t truly grasp that emotion or concept. How much more, then, when we try to express a thought to someone else! When you choose clear, concrete terms, you leave less room for confusion. When a writer uses vague words or passive descriptions it often comes down to the writer himself not truly grasping what he wants to describe. Clear writing means using concrete terms as often as possible.
“So long as you prefer abstract words, which express other men’s summarised concepts of things, to concrete ones which as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at second-hand. If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond. Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent.”
Concrete terms demand clear thinking. Because writing is thinking, the quality of a writer’s thinking is laid out on the page for all to see. When a writer does not have a firm grasp on what he or she would like to say, abstract terms abound. Replacing vague terms with precise nouns makes shaky reasoning obvious. Where your thinking is obviously shaky, you will correct it. The result of more precise descriptions is sharper thinking. When a writer settles for abstract terms, though, this process can not happen.
Where you avoid difficulty, you avoid growth. When you settle for an unclear term, you are choosing not to clearly hammer out what it is you want to say. Instead of chiseling away and getting to the crux of your message, you leave an abstract term there to confuse the reader. The skillful writer attacks the abstract and finds a way to make their fuzzy idea a clear image.
Clear writing is clear thinking. Attack the abstract term; eliminate unclear images and refine your thinking. See what new insights that clarity brings.
*All quotes are from “On the Art of Writing: Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914″, by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, unless otherwise attributed.
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