1500 words descriptive, argument, or an expository essay

Excerpts from On Writing Well

William Zinsser

New York, Harper, 1998,

Chapters 2 through 4

2. Simplicity

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in

unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Who can understand the viscous language of everyday American commerce and

enterprise: the business letter, the interoffice memo, the corporation report, the

notice from the bank explaining its latest "simplified" statement? What member of

an insurance or medical plan can decipher the brochure that tells him what his

costs and benefits are? What father or mother can put together a child's toy—on

Christmas Eve or any other eve—from the instructions on the box? Our national

tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who

announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation

wouldn't dream of saying that it may rain. The sentence is too simple—there must

be something wrong with it.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.

Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word,

every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive

construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the

thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they

usually occur, ironically, in proportion to education and rank.

During the late 1960s the president of a major university [end of page 7] wrote a

letter to mollify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. "You are probably

aware," he began, "that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially

explosive expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related." He meant

that the students had been hassling them about different things. I was far more

upset by the president's English than by the students' potentially explosive

expressions of dissatisfaction. I would have preferred the presidential approach

taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he tried to convert into English his own

government's memos, such as this blackout order of 1942:

Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings

and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid

for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination.

"Tell them," Roosevelt said, "that in buildings where they have to keep the work

going to put something across the windows."

Simplify, simplify. Thoreau said it, as we are so often reminded, and no American

writer more consistently practiced what he preached. Open Walden to any page and

you will find a man saying in a plain and orderly way what is on his mind:

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as

solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men

than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let

him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene

between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded

hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. [end of page 8]

How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is

to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing: one can't exist

without the other. It is impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He

may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and

there is no sin so grave, for he will not easily be lured back.

Who is this elusive creature the reader? He is a person with an attention span of

about twenty seconds. He is assailed on every side by forces competing for his

time: by newspapers and magazines, by television and radio, by his stereo and

videocassettes, by his wife and children and pets, by his house and his yard and all

the gadgets that he has bought to keep them spruce, and by that most potent of

competitors, sleep. The man snoozing in his chair with an unfinished magazine

open on his lap is a man who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the

writer.

It won't do to say that the snoozing reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace

with the train of thought. My sympathies are with him. If the reader is lost, it is

generally because the writer has not been careful enough to keep him on the path.

This carelessness can take any number of forms. Perhaps a sentence is so

excessively cluttered that the reader, hacking his way through the verbiage, simply

doesn't know what it means. Perhaps a sentence has been so shoddily constructed

that the reader could read it in any of several ways. Perhaps the writer has switched

pronouns in mid-sentence, or has switched tenses, so the reader loses track of who

is talking or when the action took place. Perhaps Sentence B is not a logical sequel

to Sentence A—the writer, in whose head the connection is clear, has not bothered

to provide the missing link. Perhaps the writer has used an important word

incorrectly by not taking the trouble to look it up. He may think [end of page 9]

that "sanguine" and "sanguinary" mean the same thing, but the difference is a

bloody big one. The reader can only infer (speaking of big differences) what the

writer is trying to imply.

Pages 10 and 11.

Two pages of the final manuscript of this chapter. Although they look like a first

draft, they have already been rewritten and retyped—like almost every other

page—four or five times. With each rewrite I try to make what I have written

tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that is not doing

useful work, until at last I have a clean copy for the printer. Then I go over it once

more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be

profitably cut.

Faced with these obstacles, the reader is at first a remarkably tenacious bird. He

blames himself—he obviously missed something, and he goes back over the

mystifying sentence, or over the whole paragraph, piecing it out like an ancient

rune, making guesses and moving on. But he won't do this for long. The writer is

making him work too hard, and the reader will look for one who is better at his

craft. The writer must therefore constantly ask himself: What am I trying to say?

Surprisingly often, he doesn't know. Then he must look at what he has written and

ask: Have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first

time? If it's not, it is because some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery.

The clear writer is a person clear-headed enough to see this stuff for what it is:

fuzz.

I don't mean that some people are born clear-headed and are therefore natural

writers, whereas others are naturally fuzzy and will never write well. Thinking

clearly is a conscious act that the writer must force upon himself, just as if he were

embarking on any other project that requires logic: adding up a laundry list or

doing an algebra problem. Good writing doesn't come naturally, though most

people obviously think it does. The professional writer is forever being bearded by

strangers who say that they'd like to "try a little writing sometime" when they retire

from their real profession. Or they say, "I could write a book about that." I doubt it.

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come

out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this as a consolation in

moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do. [end of page 12]

3. Clutter

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. New

varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech. John

Dean holds the record. In just one day of testimony on TV during the Watergate

hearings he raised the clutter quotient by 400 percent. The next day everyone in

America was saying "at this point in time" instead of "now."

Consider all the prepositions that are routinely draped onto verbs that don't need

any help. Head up. Free up. Face up to. We no longer head committees. We head

them up. We don't face problems anymore. We face up to them when we can free

up a few minutes. A small detail, you may say—not worth bothering about.

It is worth bothering about. The game is won or lost on hundreds of small details.

Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that

shouldn't be there. "Up" in "free up" shouldn't be there. Can we picture anything

being freed up? The writer of clean English must examine every word that he puts on paper. He will find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.

Take the adjective "personal," as in "a personal friend of mine," "his personal

feeling" or "her personal physician." It is typical of the words that can be

eliminated nine times out of ten. The personal friend has come into the language to

distinguish him from the business friend, thereby debasing not only language but

friendship. Someone's feeling is his personal feeling—that's what "his" means. As

for the personal physician, he is that man summoned to the dressing room of a

stricken actress so that she won't have to be treated by the impersonal physician

assigned to the theater. Someday I'd like to see him identified as "her doctor."

Physicians are physicians, friends are friends. The rest is clutter.

Clutter is the laborious phrase which has pushed out the short word that means the

same thing. These locutions are a drag on energy and momentum. Even before

John Dean gave us "at this point in time," people had stopped saying "now." They

were saying "at the present time," or "currently," or "presently" (which means

"soon"). Yet the idea can always be expressed by "now" to mean the immediate

moment ("Now I can see him"), or by "today" to mean the historical present

("Today prices are high"), or simply by the verb "to be" ("It is raining"). There is

no need to say, "At the present time we are experiencing precipitation."

Speaking of which, we are experiencing considerable difficulty getting that word

out of the language now that it has lumbered in. Even your dentist will ask if you

are experiencing any pain. If he were asking one of his own children he would say,

"Does it hurt?" He would, in short, be himself. By using a more pompous phrase in

his professional role he not only sounds more important; he blunts the painful edge

of truth. It is the language of the airline stewardess demonstrating the oxygen mask

that will drop down if the plane should somehow run out of air. "In the extremely

unlikely possibility that the aircraft should experience such an eventuality," she

begins—a phrase so oxygen-depriving in itself that we are prepared for any

disaster, and even gasping death shall lose its sting. As for her request to "kindly

extinguish all smoking materials," I often wonder what materials are smoking.

Maybe she thinks my coat and tie are on fire. [End of page 14]

Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed

socioeconomic area, a salesman into a marketing representative and garbage

collectors into waste disposal personnel. In New Canaan, Connecticut, the

incinerator is now the "volume reduction unit." I think of Bill Mauldin's cartoon

showing two hoboes riding a freight train. One of them says, "I started as a simple

bum, but now I'm hard-core unemployed."

Clutter is the official language used by the American corporation—in its news

release and its annual report—to hide its mistakes. When a big company recently

announced that it was "decentralizing its organizational structure into major profit-

centered businesses" and that "corporate staff services will be realigned under two

senior vice-presidents" it meant that it had had a lousy year.

Clutter is the language of the interoffice memo ("The trend to mosaic

communication is reducing the mean-ingfulness of concern about whether or not

demographic segments differ in their tolerance of periodicity") and the language of

computers ("Congruent command paradigms explicitly represent the semantic

oppositions in the definitions of the commands to which they refer").

Clutter is the language of the Pentagon throwing dust in the eyes of the populace

by calling an invasion a "reinforced protective reaction strike" and by justifying its

vast budgets on the need for "credible second-strike capability" and "counterforce

deterrence." How can we grasp such vaporous double-talk? As George Orwell

pointed out in "Politics and the English Language," an essay written in 1946 but

cited frequently during the Vietnam and Cambodia years of Johnson and Nixon,

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the

indefensible. . . . Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism,

question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." Orwell's [end of page 15] warning

that clutter is not just a nuisance but a deadly tool came true in America in the

1960s.

In fact, the art of verbal camouflage reached new heights of invention during

General Alexander Haig's tenure as Secretary of State in the Reagan

administration. Before Haig nobody had ever thought of saying "at this juncture of

maturization" to mean "now." He told the American people that he saw "improved

pluralization" in El Salvador, that terrorism could be fought with "meaningful

sanctionary teeth" and that intermediate nuclear missiles were "at the vortex of

cruciality." As for any worries that the public might have about such matters, his

message—reduced to one-syllable words—was "leave it to Al." What he actually

said was, "We must push this to a lower decibel of public fixation. I don't think

there's much of a learning curve to be achieved in this area of content."

I could go on quoting examples from various fields—every profession has its

growing arsenal of jargon to fire at the layman and hurl him back from its walls.

But the list would be depressing and the lesson tedious. The point of raising it now

is to serve notice that clutter is the enemy, whatever form it takes. It slows the

reader and robs the writer of his personality, making him seem pretentious.

Beware, then, of the long word that is no better than the short word: "numerous"

(many), "facilitate" (ease), "individual" (man or woman), "remainder" (rest),

"initial" (first), "implement" (do), "sufficient" (enough), "attempt" (try), "referred

to as" (called), and hundreds more. Beware, too, of all the slippery new fad words

for which the language already has equivalents: overview and quantify, paradigm

and parameter, infrastructure and interface, private sector and public sector,

optimize and maximize, prioritize and poten-tialize. They are all weeds that will

smother what you write. Nor are all the weeds so obvious. Just as insidious are the

little growths of perfectly ordinary words with which we explain [end of page 16]

how we propose to go about our explaining, or which inflate a simple preposition

or conjunction into a whole windy phrase.

"I might add," "It should be pointed out," "It is interesting to note that"—how

many sentences begin with these dreary clauses announcing what the writer is

going to do next? If you might add, add it. If it should be pointed out, point it out.

If it is interesting to note, make it interesting. Being told that something is

interesting is the surest way of tempting the reader to find it dull; are we not all

stupefied by what follows when someone says, "This will interest you"? As for the

inflated prepositions and conjunctions, they are the innumerable phrases like "with

the possible exception of" (except), "due to the fact that" (because), "he totally

lacked the ability to" (he couldn't), "until such time as" (until), "for the purpose of"

(for).

Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? Here's a device I used at Yale that

students found helpful. I would put brackets around any component in a piece of

writing that wasn't doing useful work. Often it was just one word that got

bracketed: the unnecessary preposition appended to a verb ("order up"), or the

adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb ("smile happily"), or the adjective

that states a known fact ("tall skyscraper"). Often my brackets surrounded the little

qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit ("a bit," "sort of") or the

announcements like "I'm tempted to say." Sometimes my brackets surrounded an

entire sentence—the one that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said,

or that tells the reader something he doesn't need to know or can figure out for

himself. Most people's first drafts can be cut by 50 percent—they're swollen with

words and phrases that do no new work whatever.

My reason for bracketing the extra words instead of crossing them out was to avoid

violating the sentence. I wanted to leave it intact for the student to analyze. I was

saying, "I [end of page 17] may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the

meaning won't be affected at all. But you decide: read the sentence without the

bracketed material and see if it works." In the early weeks of the term I gave back

papers that were infested with brackets. Entire paragraphs were bracketed. But

soon the students learned to put mental brackets around their own clutter, and by

the end of the term their papers were almost clean. Today many of those students

are professional writers and they tell me, "I still see your brackets— they're

following me through life."

You can develop the same eye. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it

ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re-examine each

sentence that you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought

be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish?

Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?

Simplify, simplify. [End of page 18]

4. Style

So much for early warnings about the bloated monsters that lie in ambush for the

writer trying to put together a clean English sentence.

"But," you may say, "if I eliminate everything that you think is clutter and strip

every sentence to its barest bones, will there be anything left of me?"

The question is a fair one and the fear entirely natural. Simplicity carried to its

extreme might seem to point to a style where the sentences are little more

sophisticated than "Dick likes Jane" and "See Spot run."

I'll answer the question first on the level of mere carpentry. Then I'll get to the

larger issue of who the writer is and how to preserve his or her identity.

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much

excess or murkiness has crept into their style and how it obstructs what they are

trying to say. If you give me an article that runs to eight pages and I tell you to cut

it to four, you'll howl and say it can't be done. Then you will go home and do it,

and it will be infinitely better. After that comes the hard part: cutting it to three.

The point is that you have to strip down your writing before you can build it back

up. You must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to

do. If I may labor the metaphor of carpentry, it is first necessary to be able to saw

wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can [end of page 19] bevel the edges or

add elegant finials, if that is your taste. But you can never forget that you are

practicing a craft that is based on certain principles. If the nails are weak, your

house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your

sentences will fall apart.

I'll admit that various nonfiction writers like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer have

built some remarkable houses. But these are writers who spent years learning their

craft, and when at last they raised their fanciful turrets and hanging gardens, to the

surprise of all of us who never dreamed of such ornamentation, they knew what

they were doing. Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.

First, then, learn to hammer in the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and

serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.

But you will be impatient to find a "style"—to embellish the plain words so that

readers will recognize you as someone special. You will reach for gaudy similes

and tinseled adjectives, as if "style" were something you could buy at a style store

and drape onto your words in bright decorator colors. (Decorator colors are the

colors that decorators come in.) Resist this shopping expedition: there is no style

store.

Style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair,

or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first

glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second

glance—and with a toupee there is always a second glance—he doesn't look quite

right. The problem is not that he doesn't look well groomed; he does, and we can

only admire the wigmaker's almost perfect skill. The point is that he doesn't look

like himself.

This is the problem of the writer who sets out deliberately to garnish his prose.

You lose whatever it is that makes you unique. The reader will usually notice if

you are putting on [end of page 20] airs. He wants the person who is talking to him

to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.

No rule, however, is harder to follow. It requires the writer to do two things which

by his metabolism are impossible. He must relax and he must have confidence.

Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being prodded for a

possible hernia, and, as for confidence, he is a bundle of anxieties. See how stiffly

he sits, glaring at the paper or the screen that awaits his words, chewing the eraser

on the pencil that is so sharp because he has sharpened it so many times. A writer

will do anything to avoid the act of writing. I can testify from my newspaper days

that the number of trips made to the water cooler per reporter-hour far exceeds the

body's known need for fluids.

What can be done to put the writer out of these miseries? Unfortunately, no cure

has yet been found. I can only offer the consoling thought that you are not alone.

Some days will go better than others; some will go so badly that you will despair

of ever writing again. We have all had many of these days and will have many

more.

Still, it would be nice to keep the bad days to a minimum, which brings me back to

the matter of trying to relax.

As I said earlier, the average writer sets out to commit an act of literature. He

thinks that his article must be of a certain length or it won't seem important. He

thinks how august it will look in print. He thinks of all the people who will read it.

He thinks that it must have the solid weight of authority. He thinks that its style

must dazzle. No wonder he tightens: he is so busy thinking of his awesome

responsibility to the finished article that he can't even start. Yet he vows to be

worthy of the task, and, casting about for heavy phrases that would never occur to

him if he weren't trying so hard to make an impression, he plunges in. Paragraph 1

is a disaster—a tissue of ponderous generalities [end of page 21] that seem to have

come out of a machine. No person could have written them. Paragraph 2 is not

much better. But Paragraph 3 begins to have a somewhat human quality, and by

Paragraph 4 the writer begins to sound like himself. He has started to relax.

It's amazing how often an editor can simply throw away the first three or four

paragraphs of an article and start with the paragraph where the writer begins to

sound like himself. Not only are the first few paragraphs hopelessly impersonal

and ornate; they also don't really say anything. They are a self-conscious attempt at

a fancy introduction, and none is necessary.

A writer is obviously at his most natural and relaxed when he writes in the first

person. Writing is, after all, a personal transaction between two people, even if it is

conducted on paper, and the transaction will go well to the extent that it retains its

humanity. Therefore I urge people to write in the first person—to use "I" and "me"

and "we" and "us." They usually put up a fight.

"Who am I to say what I think?" they ask. "Or what / feel?"

"Who are you not to say what you think?" I reply. "There's only one you. Nobody else thinks or feels in exactly the same way."

"But no one cares about my opinions," they say. "It would make me feel

conspicuous."

"They'll care if you tell them something interesting," I say, "and tell them in words

that come naturally."

Nevertheless, getting writers to use "I" is seldom easy. They think they must

somehow earn the right to reveal their emotions or their deepest thoughts. Or that

it's egotistical. Or that it's undignified—a fear that hobbles the academic world.

Hence the professorial use of "one" ("One finds oneself not wholly in accord with

Dr. Maltby's view of the human condition") and of the impersonal "it is" ("It is to

be [end of page 22] hoped that Professor Felt's essay will find the wider audience it

most assuredly deserves"). I don't want to meet "one"—he's a boring guy. I want a

professor with a passion for his subject to tell me why it fascinates him.

1 realize that there are vast regions of writing where "I" is not allowed.

Newspapers don't want "I" in their news stories; many magazines don't want it in

their articles; businesses and institutions don't want it in the annual reports and

pamphlets that they send so profusely into the American home. Colleges don't want

"I" in their term papers or dissertations, and English teachers in elementary and

high schools have been taught to discourage any first-person pronoun except the

literary "we" ("We see in Melville's symbolic use of the white whale . . .").

Many of these prohibitions are valid. Newspaper articles should consist of news,

reported as objectively as possible. And I sympathize with teachers who don't want

to give students an easy escape into opinion—"I think Hamlet was stupid"—before

the students have grappled with the discipline of assessing a work on its merits and

on external sources. "I" can be a self-indulgence and a cop-out.

Still, we have become a society fearful of revealing who we are. We have evolved

a national language of impersonality. The institutions that seek our support by

sending us their brochures tend to sound remarkably alike, though surely all of

them—hospitals, schools, libraries, museums— were founded and are still

sustained by men and women with different dreams and visions. Where are these

people? It is hard to glimpse them among all the passive sentences that say

"initiatives were undertaken" and "priorities have been identified."

Even when "I" is not permitted, it's still possible to convey a sense of I-ness. James

Reston, for instance, doesn't use "I" in his columns; yet I have a good idea of what

kind of person he is, and I could say the same of other essayists and [end of page

23] reporters. Good writers are always visible just behind their words. If you aren't

allowed to use "I," at least think "I" while you write, or write the first draft in the

first person and then take the T's out. It will warm up your impersonal style.

Style, of course, is ultimately tied to the psyche, and writing has deep

psychological roots. The reasons why we express ourselves as we do, or fail to

express ourselves because of "writer's block," are buried partly in the subconscious

mind. There are as many different kinds of writer's block as there are kinds of

writers, and I have no intention of trying to untangle them here. This is a short

book, and my name isn't Sigmund Freud.

But I've noticed a new reason for avoiding "I" that runs even deeper than what is

not allowed or what is undignified. Americans are suddenly uncertain of what they

think a d unwilling to go out on a limb—an odd turn of events for a nation famous

for the "rugged individualist." A generation ago our leaders told us where they

stood and what they believed. Today they perform the most strenuous verbal feats

to escape this fate. Watch them wriggle through television interviews without

committing themselves on a single issue.

I remember President Ford trying to assure a group of visiting businessmen that his

fiscal policies would work. He said: "We see nothing but increasingly brighter

clouds every month." I took this to mean that the clouds were still fairly dark.

Ford's sentence, however, was just misty enough to say nothing and still sedate his

constituents.

But the true champ is Elliot Richardson, who held four major Cabinet positions in

the 1970s—Attorney General and Secretary of Defense, Commerce and H.E.W.

It's hard to know even where to begin picking from his vast trove of equivocal

statements, but consider this one: "And yet, on balance, affirmative action has, I

think, been a qualified success." A thirteen-word sentence with five hedging

words. I [end of page 24] give it first prize as the most wishy-washy sentence of

the decade, though a close rival would be Richardson's analysis of how to ease

boredom among assembly-line workers: "And so, at last, I come to the one firm

conviction that I mentioned at the beginning: it is that the subject is too new for

final judgments."

That's a firm conviction? Leaders who bob and weave like aging boxers don't

inspire confidence—or deserve it. The same thing is true of writers. Sell yourself,

and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your

own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure

willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy

to keep yourself going. [end of page 25]