Simplicity

by William Zinsser

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in

unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless

jargon.

Who can understand the viscous language of everyday American commerce and

enterprise: the business letter, the interoffice memo, the corporation report,

the notice from the t bank explaining its latest "simplified" statement? What

member of an insurance or medical l plan can decipher the brochure that tells

him what his costs and benefits are? What father or i mother can put together a

child's toy-on Christmas Eve or any other eve-from the instructions on the box?

Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline

pilot who wakes us to announce that he is presently anticipating experiencing

considerable weather wouldn't dream of saying that there's a storm ahead and it

may get bumpy. The sentence is too simple-there must be something wrong with it.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest

components Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a

short word, every adverb which carries the same meaning that is already in the

verb, every passive construction that leaves she reader unsure of who is doing

what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a

sentence. And they usually occur, ironically, in proportion to education and

rank.

During the late 1960s the president of a major university wrote a letter to

mollify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. "You are probably aware," he

began, "that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially explosive

expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related." He meant that

the students had been hassling them about different things. I was far more upset

by the president's English than by the students' potentially explosive

expressions of dissatisfaction.