In many occasions, we see the man or
woman snoozing on a chair with a magazine or a book. What do you think about
such person? Is he/she a dumb who cannot trail through the written ideas? As
William Zinsser, an American writer and a teacher, tells, he/she is a reader
who was given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
The reader has an attention span of
about 30 seconds. Zinsser claims that the reader is also a person assailed by
many forces competing for attention. Those forces were newspapers, magazines,
radio, home entertainment center (television and video games), the fax machine,
children, and pets, etc., in old days. Now, the list of such forces includes
smart phones, social networking sites, gaming platforms, email, the internet, a
fitness programme, a
pool, a lawn, and sleep.
The reader is easily lost, if the
writer hasn’t been careful enough. As Zinsser declares, the carelessness may be
of any form. A sentence becomes so exclusively cluttered that the reader does
not know what it means. Writer switches pronoun in mid sentences or switches
tenses, so the reader loses track of who is talking or when the action took
place. Sentence B is not a logical sequel of Sentence A because the writer does
not provide the missing link. Writer uses a word incorrectly by not taking the
trouble to look it up.
Zinsser writes that the reader loses
interest because people even with high education and position in America and
other countries tend to inflate and sound important. He provides notable
examples to explain such tendencies. The airline pilot announces that he is
“presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation” to notify
passengers about rainfall during their flight. Zinsser’s university president
writes “you are probably aware that we have been experiencing very considerable
potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related”
in his letter to alumni to mollify a spell of campus unrest in 1960s.
These sentences have clutter. The
clotted language is with a word that serves no function, a long word that can
be short, an adverb that carries same meaning that is already in the verb, the
passive construction that leaves reader unsure of who is doing what. Such words
weaken the strength of a sentence.
The cluttered sentences are stripped
to their cleanest components as the secrete of good writing. Zinsser provides
some examples of sentences constructed with such action. He quotes from the
government’s memos of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the 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
air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or
external illuminations.” “Tell them that buildings where they have to keep work
going to put something across windows.”
He picks another example of
uncluttered sentence from Walden, where a man plainly and clearly says “I went
to woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when
I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
To achieve enviable freedom from clutter, Zinsser further tells to clear heads of clutter. Clear thinking always exists with clear writing. Zinsser lists questions that writer must ask constantly as:
What am I trying to say? Have I said it (ask after looking at
what you have written.)? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for
the first time? He adds that the clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to
see this for fuzz. Zinsser does not mean that some people are born clear headed
and are therefore natural writers, whereas other are naturally fuzzy and will
never write well. The writer achieves clear thinking by his/her conscious act
and by forcing on him/herself as it requires in projects like making a shopping
list or doing an algebra problem. Good writing does not come naturally.
Zinsser concludes that writing is
hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right
the first time, or even the third time. If you find writing is hard, it’s
because it is hard.
