Near the start of George Orwell’s 1984, there is a sentence that most readers skip over without pausing: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The clocks are one tiny, purposeful error that causes anxiety before the reader has a chance to process what they have read. It takes around two seconds to read the entire line, and Orwell most likely took much longer to write it. The true craft of writing exists in the space between the time it takes to create something and the time it takes to consume it.
Most writers have a terrible instinct, especially when they are just starting out. Even when a simpler sentence would be more effective, there is a tendency toward complexity, the lengthy sentence that winds through qualifying clauses before reaching a point, and the word that sounds authoritative. It has a rigorous feel to it. It reads like mist. In order to identify and address this tendency, Richard Lanham created what he called the Paramedic Method in his book Revising Prose. This checklist asks writers to identify prepositions, weak verbs, hidden actions, and then simplify. In his examples, passages of more than twenty words frequently condense to seven without losing any of their meaning and with a significant increase in force. Everything that was there to sound impressive rather than to communicate is routinely removed.
It is more difficult to maintain the distinction between sounding impressive and being clear than it may seem. When reading a passage with complex vocabulary and lengthy, nested sentences, the brain experiences what is known as intellectual weight. It can be mistaken for good writing when you feel as though the writer is more knowledgeable than you. Clarity, on the other hand, is the opposite of that sensation; it is the experience of an idea coming to you effortlessly and without resistance, as though you already knew it in part and the writer simply gave it the proper form. You can see it when Hemingway talks about a man crossing a square in the morning light. To see it, you don’t need to work. That’s not easy writing. That is extremely challenging writing that has been presented as easy.
In his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost argued for sentence rhythm in terms that are easy for writers to recall because the passage itself makes clear that short sentences have a powerful impact. They touch down. Long sentences have a completely different quality; they create a momentum that shorter constructions cannot match by building, maintaining, and extending the reader’s attention across a wider arc of thought before finally arriving somewhere. Knowing when to do what is crucial, which may seem simple but requires true skill to perform. When a brief sentence is used incorrectly for emphasis, it becomes an interruption. It’s all about being in the right place. The majority of first drafts are still unaware of the distinction.
Even though he didn’t speak English well until he was in his twenties, Joseph Conrad wrote some of the most physically accurate prose in the language. He used unusual words because they captured something that a common word couldn’t, not to brag. He described a character who “swarmed up the rope,” which differs from climbing, scrambling, or pulling oneself up in terms of the scene’s overall texture. What distinguishes writing that is merely correct from writing that is vivid is that quality—going beyond the first word that comes to mind to the one that actually fits. Difficulty and precision are two different things. The reverse is true.
By giving the reader the experience instead of asking them to approximate it, the exact word lessens the amount of work the reader’s imagination must do.
In writing about his own art in a completely different medium, Michelangelo expressed the idea as succinctly as anyone: “Take infinite pains to make something that looks effortless.” That’s the agreement that excellent writing makes with its audience. The reader doesn’t see the actual effort—the rejected drafts, the sentences that are rewritten ten times, the paragraph that is rearranged three times before it ends up where it should. They only witness the final product, which moves effortlessly and conveys its concepts in a way that seems inevitable. The scaffolding has been removed, so the reader cannot see it. The building is all that’s left, and a good building doesn’t appear to be under construction. It simply seems like a place you want to be.
It’s difficult not to feel a sort of subdued admiration for authors who do this skillfully, explaining something truly complex and leaving you with the impression that you’ve figured something out rather than being lectured to. That effect, which is both simple to identify and challenging to create, is the result of great care that is focused solely on the reader rather than the writer. The audience is not required to do anything. The effort is completely undetectable. And the goal of the work has always been to achieve that seamlessness and invisibility.
