2012-09-04

Writing

The Rule

Think of the reader.

Make it easy for the reader, and do not bore him. If the reader likes what he reads, he will continue reading. If he is bored, disoriented, or can't follow your thoughts, he will stop reading. Your effort is then wasted. And you show that you are inept or lazy. To see if your text reads well, read it aloud. And if possible have someone else read it and give you feedback.

The Structure

The structure of your work shall match its content. To understand, one must order and relate ideas. If you organized your ideas well, the reader can understand them without effort. If not, you instead put that burden on your reader, and he will not be amused.

One thought per paragraph. The paragraph is the basic optical unit of text. The thought is the basic conceptual unit. Keeping them in parallel and build your text from logical units. Put several thoughts into one paragraph and you'll see how hard gets to figure out what point you are trying to make.

Don't rip a thought apart. Keep to your thought until it is done. Avoid ellipses, insertions, asides, parentheses, footnotes. An average reader can keep seven words in mind without effort. He can not know where you want to go and must follow you. Don't force him to hold your unfinished thought in mind through tiring false leads. You make your argument hard to follow and waste your reader's concentration.

Keep it short, remove chaff. Leave out the superfluous from your argument. Cut unnecessary paragraphs, sentences and words. You make your argument more clear and forceful, save space for important statements, and you save your reader's time.

Parallel form for parallel thoughts. Here form makes content easy to see. For long lists of parallel information, use a list.

Use sections. In longer texts, just plain text paragraphs are not be enough to get the overall logical structure. Use chapters, sections to organize your text. Headings help to make them visible.

Main point at the start, Emphasis at the end. The reader always will read the beginning of your text, so put your main message there. The start is distinct from the main body of text, so the reader remembers it more strongly. The same goes for the end which leaves the last and strongest impression -- if he readsit.

No monotony. Finally, don't apply any rule without reprieve. One short, positive, active sentence after the other gets boring, too. Spice up your text by variety.

The Sentences

Put main points in main clauses. Avoid dependent clauses that carry the main point, an additional main point, carry on the action or insert some thought that is unrelated. Use dependent clauses sparingly to break the monotony of chains of main clauses. Appending them is better then prepending them, and inserting them is bad.

Keep to one tense. Usually talk present voice. It feels uncoordinated and thoughtless if you are switching times all the time.

Use positive statements. They are more specific then negative ones, and easier to understand. Above all, avoid double negations. "They don't make it less difficult." -- see?

Use active voice. Say "He showed", not "It was demonstrated". Action is more alive than passivity. The sentences will shorter, and easier to understand. It forces you to know the actor, too, so helps you think things through.

Keep split-able verbs together. If you don't, the reader has to keep in mind half of the verb, while skipping over your sentence to find the other half. He will have less attention for what you say, and tire faster.

The Words

Short words. Short words are easy, long words are hard. It is that simple. The more syllables, the harder to understand. Short words often are less abstract than long ones, too. "Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all." -- Winston Churchill

Gripping, concrete words. Abstract words print no image in the reader's mind. Narrow, concrete words are more exact and less judging. Say hen, not chicken, say chicken, not poultry. Use pars pro toto to stay brief and vivid if you talk about general things.

Use action verbs. Verbs drive the action, they are stronger than nouns. Therefore, don't replace them with nouns if you can avoid it: don't say "hold a meeting", say "meet". It is shorter, too.

No adjectives. Adjectives they are fat on lean sentences. Adjectives soften the impact of their noun. Get rid of them. Try cutting all adjectives from a text, and you will be surprised how much more toned it will be. Adjectives distract from the idea the noun expresses. If you feel that you need an adjective, try first to find a more fitting noun.

No fillers. Get rid of filler words like little, pretty, quite, rather, very and of phrases like in this context or in my opinion. They add no information and weaken the statement.

The Orthography, Grammar, Form

Your text has to be correct, before you can worry if it is gripping and easy to understand. In the age of spell checkers, this is no real concern. Spell checkers may not be perfect, but they come close enough. Use them. Even more than the syntax, the form is nothing to worry about anymore in the age of computer typesetting.

Closing Remarks

These hard-and-fast rules for non-fiction writing do not always hold, but break them consciously to achieve a certain effect, not out of laziness.

In scientific writing abstraction, big words, and hard-to-follow sentences are all too common. People are either think this is required to appear "professional", or have not understood their subject well enough, or just do not care. I think there is no substance to it: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." --Albert Einstein

Many ideas in this document have been taken from "Deutsch für Profis'', partly from "The Elements of Style''. Both books are excellent. To anyone who understands German I highly recommend the first one - it is more thorough and more entertaining to read.

References

[Sch00] Wolf Schneider. Deutsch für Profis. Goldmann, 1999. ISBN: 3-442-16175-4.
[Str79] William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. Number 3/e. MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1979. ISBN: 0-024-18200-1.