Notes

1. Don’t begin sentences with and or but. If you want to begin a sentence with a clause expressing familiar information about causation, introduce the clause with since, because since implies that the reader already knows what is in the clause: 2. Use the relative pronoun that—not which—for restrictive clauses. limit which to nonrEstrictivE clausEs. 3. Don’t split infinitives. 4. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. 5. Don’t use hopefully to mean ‘I hope.’

Rewrite: e.g. The outsourcingof high-tech work to Asia by corporations means the loss of jobs for many American workers. a. If the actions are nominalizations, make them verbs. outsourcing —outsource loss — lose b. Make the characters the subjects of those verbs. corporations outsource American workers lose c. Rewrite the sentence with subordinating conjunctions such as because,if,when,although,why,how,whether,or that. ✓Many middle-class American workers are losing their jobs, becausecorporations are outsourcing their high-tech work to Asia.

Most readers want the subjects of verbs to name flesh-and-blood characters. But often, you must write about abstractions. When you do, turn them into virtual characters by making them the subjects of verbs that tell a story. If readers are familiar with your abstractions, no problem. But when they are not, avoid using lots of other abstract nominalizations around them.

Many writers use the passive too often, but it has important uses. Use it in these contexts: • You don’t know who did an action, readers don’t care, or you don’t want them to know. • You want to shift a long and complex bundle of information to the end of a sentence, especially when doing so also lets you begin with a chunk of information that is shorter, more familiar, and therefore easier to understand. • You want to focus your readers’ attention on one or another character. Some writers and editors avoid the first person by using the passive everywhere, but deleting an I or we doesn’t make a researcher’s thinking more objective. We know that behind those impersonal sentences are still flesh- and-blood people doing, thinking, and writing. In fact, the first-person I and we are common in scholarly prose when used with verbs that name actions unique to the writer.

So far, we have identified three main principles of clarity. Two are about sentences: • Make main characters the subjects of sentences. • Make important actions verbs. The third is about sentences as well, but it also explains how sentences flow together: • Put old information before new information. These principles usually complement one another, but if you have to choose among them, favor the third. The way you organize old and new information determines how cohesive readers will find your writing. And for readers, a passage’s overall cohesion trumps the clarityof individual sentences.

Before you begin writing, name the things you are writing about. Those are your topics. They should be short, concrete, familiar words, and more often than not, they should name the main characters in your story. Most of your subjects should be topics. Most important, be consistent: do not vary your subjects for the sake of variety. Your topics should tell your readers what a passage is globally “about.”

In general, your sentences should begin with elements that are relatively short: a short introductory phrase or clause, followed by a short, concrete subject, followed by a verb expressing a specific action. After the verb, the sentence can go on for several lines, if it is well constructed. The general principle is to carry the reader not from complexity to simplicity, but from simplicity to complexity.

Just as we look at the first few words of a sentence for point of view, we look to the last few words for emphasis. You can revise a sentence to emphasize particular words that you want readers to hear stressed and thereby note as particularly significant. This basic principle applies to individual sentences, to substantive paragraphs, to sections and subsections, and to wholes: Readers are more likely to judge as clear any unit of writing that opens with a short segment that they can easily grasp and that frames the longer and more complex segment that follows.

Six Principles of Concision When I edited that sentence about suggestions, I followed six principles: 1. Delete words that mean little or nothing. 2. Delete words that repeat the meaning of other words. 3. Delete words implied by other words. 4. Replace a phrase with a word. 5. Change negatives to affirmatives. 6. Delete useless adjectives and adverbs.

When you find a sentence with a very long introductory clause, try moving it to the end. If it doesn’t fit there, try turning it into a sentence of its own.

In fact, this principle of simple-before-complex applies to even larger units: • Begin a paragraph with a sentence (or two) expressing its point so that readers can understand what follows. • Begin a section of a document with a paragraph or two stating its point. • Do the same for a whole document: begin with an introduction that states its point and frames the rest.

This principle of short-to-long is, in fact, one of the unifying principles of a clear prose style: • It applies to the subject-verb sequence of individual sentences: the shorter the better to introduce the longer, more complex elements that follow. • It applies to the principle of old-new: old information is usually objectively shorter than new information, but it is “psychologically” shorter, as well. • It applies to ordering the logical elements of a long sentence: begin with its short point, then add the longer and more complex information that explains or supports it. • It applies again here in balanced coordination: put shorter elements before longer ones. Coordination lets you extend the line of a sentence more gracefully than by tacking on one element to another. When you can coordinate, try to order the elements so that they go from shorter to longer, from simpler to more complex.

To the principles we laid out in Part Two, we add these four: 1. Prune redundancy. • Delete words that mean little or nothing. • Delete words that repeat the meaning of other words. • Delete words implied by other words. • Replace a phrase with a word. • Change negatives to affirmatives. 2. Get the point of the sentence up front in a concise main clause. 3. Get to the verb in the main clause quickly. • Keep introductory clauses and phrases short. • Keep subjects short. • Don’t interrupt the subject-verb connection. 4. Avoid extending the line of a sentence by attaching more than one subordinate clause to one of the same kind. Instead, • Coordinate phrases and clauses, balanced ones if you seek a special effect. • Use resumptive, summative, and free modifiers. 5. Try balancing parts of sentences against one another, especially their last few words.

Write to others as you would have others write to you.

The ethical issue here is not those writers’ willful indifference, but their innocent ignorance. In that case, when writers don’t know better, we readers have the duty to meet another term of the reader-writer contract: we must not just read carefully, but when given the opportunity, respond candidly and helpfully. I know many of you think that right now you do not have the standing to do that. But one day, you will.

What experienced readers know, and you eventually will, is that clear and graceful writers are so few that when we find them, we are desperately grateful. They do not go unrewarded.