Make the complex simple

Make the complex simpleEverybody, when you think about it, writes within constraints —of time, of politics, of budget and so on. We are never perfectly free to say exactly what we might like. We are constrained, for instance, by the complexity, the sensitivity, the abstraction and the obscurity of what we have to say. We write, some of us, for an organization. There are matters of politics and confidentiality that constrain us there. And there are deadlines, frequently impossible. There is one’s mood,frequently bad, and one’s confidence, frequently low. There are the children screaming and all the other much more urgent things to be done. But these are just the constraints within which one must try to make something clear. For these are the circumstances in which we all work, trying to make the complex things simple —not the other way round. And too often our writing does tend the other way, making the simple things complex. The medical center posts this notice: “Consultation fees in this practice are individually determined by each practitioner case by case. The usual fee charged for the most common consultations are as follows . . .”It might have written, instead: “Each doctor in this practice sets their own fees, but you can expect to pay something like this for common consultations . . .”Don’t let real life be an excuse for failing to write well. Clarity and stylish simplicity are not negotiable. lore 29 Try this 1 What constraints do you work within? What do you need to be careful about? What factors place your writing under pressure and lead you to write something less than plainly, in something other than your voice? Make a list. It’s good to get clear about these things. Ask yourself which of those factors are the most important; which are material; and which are personal issues. Ask yourself how you can better conform with the legitimate constraints without compromising the vernacular clarity of your Prose. 2 Think of some technical task you know how to perform —changing a diaper, stripping down and rebuilding a car engine, saddling a horse, running a restaurant, mending a fence, loving a difficult man. There’ll be something. Make it something, ideally, not everyone knows how to do. Now describe what you do when you perform that task so that anyone could under- stand. Write three hundred words. 3 You are going speed dating tonight. You’ve been told you haveto speak about your work. You’ll have a total of two minutes with each prospective partner. Write the script of what you will say tonight about the work that you do. Imagine that it will really count —there will be that one person you really want to connect with. Don’t lie; don’t be dull; don’t imagine you can use the same kind of language I’d find in your job description.Avoid strings of nounsGovernment, academic, technical, scientific, financial, and business writing focuses on processes; it abstracts then it nominalizes things that people do; and then it leaves the people out. This results, among other things, in noun clusters. Watch for them —they are horrible to behold and hard to unravel. Spell them out where you can; you’ll need to add some verbs and articles and prepositions. Translate noun clusters first, if you can’t avoid them. An example or two: network constraint issues; estimated future after-tax cash flows; home loan interest declaration; committee action effectiveness. Every word (except for the past participle estimated and after in the compound adjective after-tax) is a noun.Sometimes noun clusters pop up in the most ordinary circumstances; often, for example, in signage or headings, where a writer is trying to be clipped. This one was on the wall of a room I where I was teaching recently: end of year function lottery ticket sales. Bottom line: noun clusters make bad reading. Use them sparingly, if you must use them at all. They are one of the ways the anxious or pompous parade their expertise.Down with fashionIf it’s in fashion today, it’ll be out tomorrow. Or one day soon. That’s how fashion works. So, you don’t want to write the kind of sentence —worse still the kind of book —that you’ll look back on, as you look back on that dress or that beard or those shoes or that song you waltzed to at your wedding, and think, “What was I thinking?”Resist fashionable turns of phrase (like pushing the envelope and going forward), vogue words (like segue and morph, like marginalize and validate and resile, like holistic and outcomes-based), and hip expressions (like 24/7). Any day now, they’ll be very yesterday. Write the kind of prose that’s never quite in fashion, and never out of style. Write a book that belongs today but lasts a little longer. Maybe a hundred years. Write clear, elegant, resonant sentences like “To be or not to be; that is the question”—four hundred years old and as good as new. Or write a blockbuster in worse than pedestrian prose, and perhaps become very, very rich! I guess it depends what you’re looking to do with your words and your time.The art of transitionYou have to lead your reader on. Every paragraph you write, every sentence in a way, is part of your exploration —by indirection, by meditation, by argument, by wondering walk, by analysis—of whatever it is you’ve said (or implied) that you have to say. Every paragraph is part of the telling of a story you’ve reduced to one or two lines and uttered (or implied) somewhere. Every sentence is a piece in the one puzzle. But which piece of what puzzle and why you’ve put it just here must be plain on the face of every word and phrase you write. Good writing holds its reader’s hand and leads her through the unfurling of itself, pointing back to the last step and forward to thenext, showing her the map, reminding her of the destination. Good writing is a coherent journey back to the place where it began. It’s a circle. It’s a wall whose logic is implicit in every stone. In good writing, a reader finds it hard to get lost. (I should add that in a novel or other work of literature, getting your readers lost, keeping them wondering, throwing them off balance, and all that are part of the writer’s purpose; but a good creative writer convinces his readers that he, at least, knows exactly where he and the piece of work are headed.) In loose and hasty prose, not only does the reader lose her way; the writer loses his as well, or never knew quite where it lay. Unity (making every stone suggestive of, and of a piece with, the whole wall) and flow (making each stone distinct and sequential) characterize good writing; and they stand in tension. The one is about sameness; the other is about change. Linkage is how you resolve them: you keep saying new things, you keep carrying the story forward, but you never stop helping your reader understand how each new development (argument, qualification, example, plot twist) is related, and how all are related, to the whole. Transition is how you make your writing both hang and flow. Good writers know about transition. They know how to lead you deftly on. Michael Pollan knows more about it than most. Here are three impeccably coherent paragraphs from his book The Botany of Desire: The garden is still a site for experiment, a good place to try out new plants and techniques without having to bet the farm. Many of the methods employed by organic farmers today were first discovered in the garden. Attempted on the scale of a whole farm, the next New Thing is an expensive and risky proposition, which is why farmers have always been a conservative breed, notoriously slow to change. But for a gardener like me, with relatively little at stake, it’s no big deal to try out a new variety of potato or method of pest control, and every season I do. Admittedly,my experiments in the garden are unscientific and far from foolproof or conclusive. Is it the new neem tree oil I sprayed on the potatoes that’s controlling the beetles so well this year, or the fact that I planted a pair of tomatillos nearby, the leaves of which the beetles seem to prefer to potatoes? (My scapegoats, I call them.) Ideally, I’d control for every variable but one, but that’s hard to do in a garden, a place that, like the rest of nature, seems to consist of nothing but variables. “Everything affecting everything else”is not a bad description of what happens in a garden or, for that matter, in any ecosystem. In spite of these complexities, it is only by trial and error that my garden ever improves, so I continue to experiment. Recently I planted something new —something very new, as a matter of fact —and embarked on my most ambitious experiment to date. I planted a potato called “NewLeaf”that has been genetically engineered (by the Monsanto corporation) to produce its own insecticide. That it does in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root, and —this is the unsettling part —every spud. Experiment in the garden is the topic here —the general idea; his par- ticular experiment; mankind’s experiment with GM crops. Notice how Pollan strings that topic through the sentences of each para- graph through words that allude to it: experiment, try out, methods, discovered, risky proposition, my experiments, unscientific, control for every variable, nothing but variables, complexities, trial and error, planted some-thing new, my most ambitious experiment. Notice the way Pollan makes neat transitions from one paragraph to the next. He does this through the word or phrase with which he starts each paragraph: Admittedly points us back to the first paragraph; In spite of these complexities points us to the ideas he has pondered in the second paragraph; Recently, which begins the second sentence of the third paragraph, links all he has said on the topic so far to what he is about to say. After a trim transitional word —Admittedly—which opens the second paragraph, the subject of the first sentence is my experiments. This subject contains the book’s topic, now familiar to us. That sentence ends with the new ideas he wants to take us to in this paragraph: variability and control. Look at the structure of the third paragraph. It starts, again, with a transitional phrase linking it to the last paragraph. The first sentence ends with words that take us to the new idea in this paragraph: his ongoing experimenting, and this experiment with“NewLeaf”in particular. The second sentence moves from experiment to newness to my most ambitious experiment to date. The opening of the third sentence, I planted, explains that personal experiment, and the rest ofthe sentence tells us more about it, making sense of the claim in the previous sentence that this was his most ambitious experiment so far. That, which opens the last sentence, points straight back to the last words of the previous sentence. If you want to make your writing cohere, master transitions. In pursuit of coherence, try these three things that Michael Pollan does so well in these three paragraphs:•Use transitional words and phrases (between sentences and paragraphs).•Allude to the main idea often in the words you use.•Pick up in sentence two the idea with which you ended sentence one, and so on.Make your prose as you might make a drystone wall. You’re not concreting the pieces; they just have to fit and stay fit. How will you chiseleach stone, how will you turn it and set it down so that it sits conformably with its neighbors and carries the wall forward? And have you left space—just enough—between the stones?。