My Hot Take on Writing Clearly

I don’t think I’m a good writer, and I’m cool with that; I don’t want to be anyways. What I want to be is a good thinker—scratch that—a great thinker! Writing is useful to me to the extent that it let’s me write down my thoughts, and communicate them—that’s it. If I have to sing a song, make a video, rap, give a speech, write a poem, use hands, use diagrams, heck even smoke signals (anything but a voice note), I will, as long as it gets the point across. All I want is to be a great communicator; to be heard and understood, and to say exactly what I mean. I think I am a great communicator. I’m bold enough to say exactly what I mean, which I think is the most important part of communication. The second most important part, is clarity.

Misunderstanding are funny. Remember that show ‘Mind your language’. It had that kind of dry deadpan but universal humor; kind of like the classic dad joke ‘Hi ___, I’m Dad.’ Such comedy shows us how easy it is to be misunderstood, even when you are speaking the same language as your audience or even when they are listening attentively, and that’s because to understand you, they have to process what you are saying. That is what is so punishing about a career as a writer—people may not be ready to read your work. Maybe it’s ahead of its time, or times have past and it is irrelevant. Maybe the Zeitgeist has little value for your kind of writing.

Trading would be the same if there were no charts. Sometimes you find a great trade, and you have to sit there and wait to see if there are any signs that it might work if you put it on, or if there’s a catalyst of some sort. In writing you can’t tell beforehand if your audience will feel you.

So courage and clarity are in my opinion the two pillars of great writing, screw anything else.

For a long time, I thought that writing clearly was about using punctuation and grammar rules correctly, having a wide vocabulary, and structuring the writing such that it flows smoothly. But I don’t think that’s right. I think writing clearly is about writing the way people talk at that particular time, depending on the audience. I think a writer should have absolute freedom to bend the ‘rules’ to suit their writing, if it will increase clarity.

We all know what … means in a text message. Ellipsis are used in books too, but it’s not quite the same. We also know tHAt WriTinG LiKE tHiS is mockery. Such devices express complex messages. I’d rather use that in my writing than: ‘… that writing like this…’, he said mockingly. It’s nowhere near the same.

That is why I love a medium such as substack because I can write exactly how I want. When you write for other mediums you have to follow the rules. If I’m right about this, then substack may change writing in a significant way because it will teach many writers that they can bend, or even break the rules, for the sake of clarity, and their audience will thank them for it. These writers will go on to write on other platforms, some will write books, and all of that will change writing forever.

That may even be good for book sales. I don’t read Stephen King novels, and I’ve never understood why I’ve never liked them, but if you held a gun to my head, I would say that it’s probably because they are too well-written. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly but I personally feel that something is lost by following all the rules. And that’s why I think advice like ‘write 1000 words a day’ is bad advice—the hard part about writing is not putting words on paper. Better advice would be ‘write everyday, even if it’s just one word.’

I base all my work on two ideals: accuracy and clarity. I strive to speak the truth (or calculate the correct figures) and to present them as clearly as possible. That’s all I’ll be doing on this blog. I’m not here to win any literary awards or be known for my writing. I’m here to deliver value for my readers. I will write the way I think is best to achieve that.

For those interested in writing more clearly, Francine Prose wrote an excellent essay about it, which you can read here. I don’t agree with her, btw. Some of the writing she calls out is plenty clear to me, and if some things were changed they would each lose something that I can’t quite name yet, but that makes them more interesting to me as a reader.

Let me try to conclude. I don’t think that writing ideas are these dead things that can be molded into shape in different ways. Each idea has a way it needs to be communicated. In writing, you should try to preserve the idea as much as possible when transferring it from your mind to the reader’s mind. Writing rules are simply universal conventions we have agreed on so far to convey things in certain ways, but as times change so do the conventions and vocabulary, and they replace old ones. I think it’s more important to use the best possible word to convey your message, and to write how you think (or speak). Then… focus on thinking and on preserving the ideas. That’s my hot-take on writing ‘clearly’.

Until next time,

Brian