You’re writing a PhD, research article or undergraduate essay. You’re excited by your topic and you have lots to say. You want to say it all, and you want to impress your reader by your high-powered, complex, sophisticated argument. Good for you. These are all laudable intentions, but one mistake that many research students fall into is that they become so intensely involved with the minutiae of their material that they expect every reader to come to their writing already possessing the same intimate knowledge of their project that it took the student themselves months to build up. You can’t expect that of your readers. If you let rip with both barrels from the first paragraph then by the end you will leave your reader poleaxed and on the floor, indignant and frustrated, buried under a barrage of technical terms, in-house phrasing and sinuous formulations.
If your reader has to stop multiple times every paragraph in order to re-read a dense sentence or to look up a specialist term you haven’t bothered to explain, don’t be surprised if your examiners become frustrated or if other readers simply give up and move on to something else. Your reader is not a potential rival you have to beat into submission, but a potential ally you have the opportunity to woo. Don’t get them offside by throwing at them paragraph after paragraph of relentlessly dense prose that assumes they knew what you were thinking when you wrote it.
When I was young, my grandfather kept a steaming compost heap at the bottom of his garden, beyond the delicious peas and raspberries. One of the “jobs” that we used to enjoy together on Saturday mornings was to take a garden fork each and aerate the compost, de-compacting it and letting it breathe. If it became too dense the reduced oxygen supply would slow or even halt the composting process. The same goes for your writing. Some undergraduate and graduate writing is so single-mindedly intense–injecting every last drop of meaning into each sentence by cramming in a cacophony of tightly-wrought, multi-syllabic words–that the reader feels suffocated in the unremitting avalanche of maximally complex point after maximally complex point.
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Do your reader a favour. Let her breathe a little. You don’t need to cram into the current paragraph everything you possibly can. You don’t need that pentasyllabic word if a shorter, more common term can get the job done just as well. It doesn’t look clever. In fact, it often has the opposite effect: it reads like a graduate essay trying too hard to look intelligent, or as an attempt to hide a paucity of argument behind a cloak of verbiage.
Complex words don’t necessarily indicate a complex argument, and the best writing on complex texts is lucid and aerated. If you introduce a new term, explain it. If you haven’t used it for a while, remind the reader in a footnote where they can find your explanation of it. Less can be more, and it’s almost always OK to slow down and let the air into your argument.
One way to do this is to find an appropriate way to illustrate your point. If there is an analogy or comparison that can help your reader to grasp what you are saying, then give them a helping hand and include it. If a metaphor can provide your reader with an “oh, now I see!” moment, then include the metaphor. Your job, if you want to write well, is not simply to tell your readers what you think, but to help them to understand what you think and why you think it. You’re not just in the information business, you’re in the persuasion business, and too much information too densely packed can weaken the persuasive power of your argument.
How do you ensure that your own writing doesn’t suffocate your reader?
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