The only writing advice you’ll ever need
It’s what my history professor told me, and his professor told him. It was true for that paper of mine on John Locke’s theory of education, and it’s true today as I write this sentence.
Never trade sense for sound.
That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. I’ll say it again for the folks in the back.
Never trade sense for sound.
Because when you make this trade, you put a barrier between your reader and the meaning that you want them to experience.
Let me break that down.
Every piece of writing has a goal. Doesn’t matter what that writing is. Email, Facebook post, encyclopedia entry. Anything. Doesn’t matter.
Whatever it is, that goal is to communicate an idea.
But let’s say that somewhere along the way, you decide to sound good doing it. Somewhere along the way, you decide to impress your readers with big words and long sentences.
After all, that’s how your college textbooks read, and that’s even how your boss writes the memos.
Following their lead, you do the same.
“Examine” becomes “examination.”
“John wrote the blog” becomes, “The blog was written by John.”
“Please don’t smoke within 20 feet of the front door” becomes, “Smokers are asked to refrain from smoking within a reasonable distance from the building entrance.”
One thing leads to another, and you become novelist Amanda McKittrick Ros:
Have you ever visited that portion of Erin’s plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?
Or maybe UC-Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Let’s hope not.
But seriously, what’s wrong with these examples?
Is it the grammar? Nope. They’re complete sentences. Punctuation? Nope.
So what is it? What makes these examples the written equivalent of getting stuck in a corn maze?
Ros and Butler both sacrificed sense for sound.
They chose sounding good over making sense, over communicating clearly. They chose “scrutinous examination” over “study” and “a renewed conception of hegemony” over “a new way of thinking about control.”
When you make this trade, you miss the goal of communicating clearly.
And I’ll even go a step further: When you make this trade, you fail completely at whatever you’re writing.
Because it’s not about you. It’s not about your big words and long sentences. It’s not about holding your audience hostage so that you can play your own game of “How Credible Can I Make Myself Sound?”
It’s about making sense. It’s about how clearly you can pass meaning on to the reader.
Nothing more, nothing less.
