CRITERION 2: CLARITY (typical feedback: unclear, vague, ungrammatical, confusing, choppy, passive, punctuation issues)
To download my handout on Clarity in pdf, click here.

NOTE: When I talk about this subject, I tend to go on and on… so I had to record two takes. The longer one, in which I delve a bit deeper into grammatical matters, is at the bottom of this page; all I’m requiring you to watch is the shorter one, immediately beneath this line.

Your writing makes your thinking visible – whether you like it or not.  For clarity in writing and thinking, you must use as many words as are necessary to get your point across; for economy, you must use as few words as are necessary to get your point across.  Achieving one often comes at the expense of the other.  Find a balance. 

Dying metaphors, pretentious diction, meaningless words, fillers, and buffers will ruin that balance.  To quote Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (essential reading to improve clarity and economy!): “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”  If you don’t really care about or believe what you are arguing, it shows.  If you’re having trouble with clarity in an essay, ask yourself what your intention in writing that essay really is.

There is a system that all writers use to arrange our words into a meaningful logical unit, and then to modify those words to make that logic clear.  It’s called grammar.  Grammar is not an obscure set of arbitrary rules for students to memorize; it’s just the system that makes words work together to form clear, meaningful, thoughtful sentences.  It cannot be learned by listing off rules (not for undergraduate humanities writing): the things we ask you to do with words require an ongoing, personal development of comfort, ease, and enjoyment with the rhythms and reasons behind your sentences. Don’t think of grammar as being right or wrong: think of it as being better or worse.  You can always make yours better.  

To improve your grammar, READ MORE, READ BETTER, AND READ MORE DEEPLY:

1) Improve the frequency and intellectual quality of your casual reading choices;

2) Try memorizing and reciting;

3) Make sure you understand a few basic concepts:

Make sure each of your sentences has a subject (a noun, or noun phrase, that does something or is something) and a predicate (the something that the subject does or is, almost always involving a verb).  Don’t ask one sentence to do too much: every sentence can convey a single thought, complex as that thought may be.  A new thought requires a new subject and new predicate.

Make sure that your pronouns refer back to their corresponding nouns (or noun phrases) in an obviously and immediately clear way.  As soon as your reader has to ask “wait, which that do you mean?”, the battle is already lost (and so too for it, they, them, its, their, whose, what, which, this, these, those, and so forth).  

Make sure that you are using a singular pronoun, verb, or adjective to modify a singular noun or noun phrase; a plural pronoun, verb, or adjective must modify a plural noun or noun phrase.

Make sure that your parallel structures are really parallel, and your parentheticals really parenthetical.  When your sentence holds up two items for comparison, it should be obviously and immediately clear exactly what those two items are, and where they begin and end.  When your sentence briefly interrupts its direction, mark that interruption off by parentheses or commas, making sure it is obviously and immediately clear how the interruption relates to the sentence, and where it begins and ends.  

The passive voice is particularly susceptible to misunderstanding — a weakness that certain writers exploit purposefully, in order to mislead their readers.  Good academic writers should only use passive-voice constructions when no active-voice alternative will get the job done as well.  Rewriting a passive-voice sentence in the active voice will often reveal hidden flaws in argumentation.

Your most powerful tool for clarity is punctuation, the system of dots and lines that writers use to clarify the logic of their sentences.  At the undergraduate level, you should make sure you know the following for starters (and should ask for guidance if you don’t!): the functions of apostrophes, quotation marks, brackets, parentheses, and capitalization (none of those can be used to emphasize, by the way); the differences between a colon and a semi-colon; the differences between a dash and a hyphen; how to separate clauses/ideas using commas (usually in pairs).

SHOW YOUR WORK.  Math problem sets often require you to “show your work”: the solution to the equation itself is only acceptable if the full process of arriving at that solution is made visible.  Essay writing is the same: a sentence is only acceptable if its full internal logic, and its connection to prior sentences, is made thoroughly visible. 

HYPOTAXIS.  You will often find that a single sentence, if your thinking is sufficiently complex, requires that you parse it out into multiple layers of hypotaxis (i.e. syntactic subordination — that is, the way a sentence organizes itself into complex logical levels).  If you get the “choppy” comment a lot, it likely means that you should expand or combine sentences though hypotaxis — not because longer sentences are better, but because you must complexify and deepen your thinking.  If you get “unclear” or “hard to follow,” perhaps you are not subordinating your levels clearly, or you are trying to get one sentence to do too much.  Remember: one sentence, one thought.

Here’s the longer version of my Clarity lecture, if you wish to watch it: