Listen to this:
The fundamental principle for the efficacious elucidation of meaning in documentation is the minimisation of abstraction of expression and the abandonment of convolution of construction and, instead, the utilisation of quotidian diction and the employment of syntactical simplification.
Okay, so it’s a spoof. And it’s meant to be absurd—it practises the very thing it preaches against. But, in its diction and in its struc- ture—which is what I want to dwell on—this is a characteristic sentence of our times.
This sentence is hard work. It makes an important but simple point complex. But how, exactly? If we can see where this sentence goes wrong, we can start writing sentences that get it right most of the time. Notice these things about it. It seems incredibly long. In fact, if you only count its words, it isn’t.Thirty-eight words isn’t short, but it’s not the number of words that’s the problem; it’s the number of
syllables. It comes in at eighty-nine of those. To read this passage is to be assaulted by syllables.Together, they make so much clangor it’s hard to make out what message they amount to.
So, it’s a moderately long sentence made up of way too many long words. In English, as a general rule, the more syllables a word has, the more abstract it is—and the less efficient. This sentence proves that rule pretty well.
You’ll have noticed that many of its words are not the kind you’d use in conversation. Its diction is obscure, stuffy and formal. In fact, this writer goes out of his way to choose fancy and longwinded ways of saying everything. It is pompous. It is wankery. It is intended to impress rather than inform. And it’s pretty much guaranteed to lose anyone who wanders in it, wounded by all its polysyllabic ordnance, angered by its pretension and bored by its ugly, exacting diction.
Notice, too, how often my sentence uses the construction ‘the
abstract nounof the abstract noun’: ‘the minimisation of abstraction of expression’ (which takes this one step further), ‘the utilisation of quotidian diction’ and ‘the employment of simplification of syntax’. This device is called nominalisation; and it’s ugly (and all too common), especially repeated like this. You could translate each nominalised phrase, using essentially similar diction, like this: ‘to minimise abstract expression’, ‘to use quotidian diction’ and ‘to employ simplified syntax’.
But that would be to use some actual verbs. And the almost complete absence of verbs in this piece is its most important failing, and a characteristic of too much bureaucratic writing. This passage takes every opportunity it can to turn verbs into abstract nouns. This not only strips the sentence of activity, it also strips it of actors. No one is doing anything in this sentence. It is abstract from top to tail.
Ask yourself who’s doing what here, and it’s very hard to say. There’s only one verb, and it’s is—the verb ‘to be’, which describes
no action at all. (This is a what-is-what kind of sentence.) If nothing is being done, nobody’s likely to be doing it. And so, here, the subject of the sentence is not a person or even a government agency but a great string of words from ‘The fundamental principle’ down to ‘documentation’. (And the ‘what’, which in this sentence is not the object but the subject–complement, is all the words that follow ‘is’.) Most of the difficulty in this sentence, in other words, arises from the inelegance of its structure or syntax, from the poverty, specifically, of its who-does-what.
To translate this sentence into the intelligent vernacular you need to find some people to enact it and some verbs for them to perform, and you need to make the whole thing concrete—describe something going on. It might become something like this:
If you want to make your meaning clear when you write, choose simple sentence structures and favour familiar words. (This uses the imperative mood.)
Writers who make their meaning clear use everyday words and make elegant sentences.
The best writers use the simplest words and structures.
Writers, especially in business, political, academic and professional settings, steer clear of such simplicity and humanity in writing, if I may be generous for a moment, because they are trying to be dispassionate and objective. Those are worthy aspirations, as far as they go. But if they lead to writing stripped of its humanity, they have failed a more important test of communication. Be objective, but not like this.
Here are some more sentences made in this characteristic contemporary style:
ABC’s implementation of the SAP system is the culmination of extensive negotiations and strategising between our organisation and ABC Inc. Our capacity for delivery of innovative solutions for clients, specifically the deployment of integrated infrastructure, is dependent upon ongoing proactive strategic engagement with relevant industry organisations.
Thus, some anomalous empirical result can always be conserved by a redistribution of predicates or truth-values across the entire existing fabric of beliefs.
These are typical sentences, too. What’s wrong with them, again, is how poorly they communicate who does what.What’s missing from them is humanity, action (or animation) and slender particulars.What’s missing from them is the stuff of life.They don’t seem real.They fail as talk; they fail to make much meaning happen fast.
Too many authors of too many modern sentences shy from people and verbs and particulars, as though they were afraid of, or embarrassed by, or unfamiliar with the real world. As though the real world had nothing to do with writing, or with the business they transact with writing: scholarship and business and government and law and banking and science. And what the experts model, as Orwell explained, the rest of us copy. So that the average modern sentence is unsound and effete; in it there is no heartbeat.
So the secret of bringing your sentences to life is this. Make sure you:
• put people in—particularly in the role of performing the verb (Who’s)
• use strong clear verbs—particularly the verb performed by the subject (Doing)
• be very clear and concrete about exactly what is going on (What).
Bearing those points in mind, you might recast the last of those sentences, for instance, like this:
If we encounter a result that doesn’t fit our thesis, we can explain that result as an anomaly and reassert the strength of our beliefs in general.
T RY T H I S
Breathe life into these sentences, making sure there’s a ‘who’s doing what’ going on in them.
It was apparent from discussions held with various parties during the course of the investigation that there are differences of opinion among them as to whether or not some of the more entrepreneurial activities currently undertaken by the country’s universities were compatible with their current mandates.
The mechanisation and commercialisation of agriculture along with the globalisation of commodities markets are the chief reasons for the deterioration of social and cultural integrity in rural Australia.
It is the conclusion of this study that the orthodox view that all species were independently created and are immutable is unsustainable.