Writing, Clear and Simple

Structure. Any document you create needs some sort of basic structure, a basic framework that you use to organize the information. And there are five basic types of structures you can choose:

Location
Alphabet
Time
Category
Hierarchy

(Richard Saul Wurman used that acrostic in his book Information Anxiety 2; I don’t know he borrowed it from someone else.)

In many cases, the material will lend itself to one structure much more than another. For example, a telephone directory seems to naturally fit into an alphabetic structure. A review of baseball players could naturally fit into a hierarchical structure, with the players ranked by some statistical measure. Biographies fit into a time-based structure.

And these structures can be mixed. The baseball player document can be organized by year, with the ranking done within each year.

However, as Wurman points out, you can gain insights by looking at information using different structures, insights not available in the “natural” structure. “Each new vantage point, each mode of organization, will create a new structure. And each new structure will enable you to see a different meaning…”

For example, what would a telephone directory look like organized based on location? When would you want that kind of organization, and who would find that structure more useful than a straightforward alphabetic list? Someone planning a marketing campaign targeted at specific neighborhoods would find such a directory useful. What would it show you if it were organized by location and time, by how long someone had lived at their current address? You’d learn something about the stability—or perhaps the stagnation—of different neighborhoods.

What if an encyclopedia were organized by categories, for example, by realms of knowledge, or perhaps geographically, by continent or country?

Take a moment to consider the basic structure of your documents. Can you perhaps gain some advantages by choosing another viewpoint, another way of organizing the information?

This is just a gut feeling, but it seems to me that many people who are intimidated by the idea of writing feel that way because there is so much to learn about it. Perhaps the memories of their school days—trying to learn all the rules of grammar and spelling, and the dread they felt when they saw all the red ink all over the reports and papers they turned in—lurk in the backs of their minds, and they think “There’s just too much to learn. I’ll never be a good writer.”

Well, it is true that there is a great deal you could try to learn to be a “good writer” (whatever that means). But that’s no reason why you can’t  begin to learn a few things in order to be a better writer.

I just ran across this tidbit by Steve Krug, in his book about Web usability, Don’t Make Me Think: 

The good news is that much of what I do is just common sense, and anyone with some interest can learn to do it.

After all, usability really just means making sure that something works well; that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing—whether it’s a Web site, a fighter jet, or a revolving door—for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated.

Like a lot of common sense, though, it’s not necessarily obvious until after someone’s pointed it out to you.

He wasn’t talking about writing, but his point applies (with only slight modification): Good writing really just means making sure that the words work well; that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can read the thing—whether it’s a Web site, the maintenance manual for a fighter jet, or an e-mail message—and understand its intended message without getting hopelessly frustrated.

If you want to be a better writer, you don’t have to begin by learning everything there is to know about writing. Begin by learning a few things. Or, if that’s too intimidating, learn one thing about writing, and start to practice it. As Krug says, it’s not rocket surgery.

For most general writing, try to keep your paragraphs short.

Look at the paragraphs in any daily newspaper, and you’re most likely to find that they’re quite short. For example, in today’s edition of The Forum, none of the paragraphs in this local, front-page story are more than one sentence.

If you look at the stories coming from the wire services, such as AP or Reuters, you’ll find the same pattern. Here’s an AP story that has mostly one- and two-sentence paragraphs, and with only a couple of three-sentence paragraphs.

Of course, there is room for variation here. Other publications use paragraphs longer than the one- or two-sentence wonders of newspapers and news services. Take a look at OpinionJournal.com (the online editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal) for an example. These are still not long paragraphs, however, averaging 3 or 4 sentences long (admittedly a rough estimate).

Why write short paragraphs?

William Zinsser puts it this way in On Writing Well:

Writing is visual—it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain. Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.

This is especially true of “practical” writing—newspapers, business documents, instruction manuals: people tend to scan the page, rather than reading word-for-word. And short paragraphs make that scanning easier, breaking the text up visually.

Remember, though, that a paragraph is a unit of thought, and as such, “the subject does not admit to precise guidance,” says Sir Ernest Gowers (author of The Complete Plain Words). “Each paragraph must be homogeneous in subject matter, and sequential in treatment of it.” That may require a long paragraph, or a short one.

Thus, “Keep sentences short” is rather like the Pirate Code, as described by Captain Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl: “The code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.”

Most of the time—almost all of the time, in fact—you’ll do well to hew to the rules of grammar. “Color inside the lines,” as it were.

But then there are those other times…

For example, you should avoid the temptation to do what Calvin (of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes) called verbing—using a noun as if it were a verb—because, as Calvin so aptly put it, “Verbing weirds language.”

But when I read the following, from a discussion of upcoming movies, at the Libertas blog, I had to give them a pass:

”Fantastic Four 2 (June 15): They had better have Wrath of Kahn’d this sucker, that’s all I’m gonna say.” [Emphasis added.]

Grammatically correct? Certainly not. Perfectly apt? Absolutely!

“When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.”

—Ernest Hemingway