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Writer’s first calling: clarity

Writer's first calling: clarity

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Corporate communicators would do well to read and heed this advice from a Jan. 11, 2013 article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Best Beginning: Clarity:

“Meek or bold, a good beginning achieves clarity. A sensible line threads through the prose; things follow one another with literal logic or with the logic of feeling. Clarity isn’t an exciting virtue, but it’s a virtue always, and especially at the beginning of a piece of prose. Some writers seem to resist clarity, even to write confusingly on purpose. Not many would admit to this.

One who did was the wonderful-though-not-to-be-imitated Gertrude Stein: “My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear.” Oddly, it’s one of the clearest sentences she ever wrote.

For many other writers, clarity simply falls victim to a desire to achieve other things, to dazzle with style or to bombard with information. It’s one thing for the reader to take pleasure in the writer’s achievements, another when the writer’s own pleasure is apparent. Skill, talent, inventiveness, all can become overbearing and intrusive. The image that calls attention to itself is often the image you can do without.The writer works in service of story and idea and always in service of the reader. Sometimes the writer who overloads an opening passage is simply afraid of boring the reader. A respectable anxiety, but nothing is more boring than confusion.

You can’t tell it all at once. A lot of the art of beginnings is deciding what to withhold until later, or never to say at all. Take one thing at a time. Prepare your readers, tell everything they need to know in order to read on, and tell no more.

Journalists are instructed not to “bury the lead”—instructed, that is, to make sure they tell the most important facts of the story first. This translates poorly to longer forms of writing. The heart of the story is usually a place to arrive at, not a place to begin. Of course the reader needs a reason to continue, but the best reason is simply confidence that the writer is going some place interesting.”

—Adapted from Messrs. Kidder and Todd’s “Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.” 

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