Clearer sentences—Part 1

Abstract

On the recommendation of George Gopen, coauthor of “The Science of Writing Science” ( American Scientist , 1990), my favorite article on technical writing, I picked up a short text called STYLE—Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams. What a find! In his preface Williams writes, “Do not take what we offer here as draconian rules of composition, but rather as diagnostic principles of interpretation. We offer these principles as the basis for questions that allow a writer or editor to anticipate how readers are likely to respond to a piece of prose, a species of knowledge usually unavailable to writers when they unreflectively reread their own writing.” This and future columns are rooted in Williams' vade mecum. I have taken many examples directly from Williams. How would you describe these sentences? 1. Our lack of knowledge about local geology precluded determination of the planner's effectiveness in resource allocation to those areas of investigation with greatest potential. 2. Because we knew nothing about local geology, we could not determine how effectively the planners had allocated resources to investigate areas of greatest potential. Most would call sentence 2 clearer and more concise. This is because sentence 1 makes us sort out and then reassemble its actions through abstract nouns— knowledge, determination , etc. The rearranging distorts the sequence of actions and obscures who does what. In 2, we have converted the abstract nouns into verbs, we've made the actors the subjects of these verbs, and we have rearranged the events into a logical sequence. …