Writing Clearly
| "Don't write so that you can be understood—write so that you cannot be misunderstood." |
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— William Howard Taft |
In my judgment, clarity is the primary virtue to strive for in philosophical writing. Of course you would like your work to have lots of other virtues, too (accuracy, reasonableness, depth, originality, and so on), but these other virtues are almost impossible to attain without first making your ideas clear.
How is clarity achieved?
My quick answer is this: through attentive revision. You should not expect that the first version of your ideas that you put down on the page to be acceptably clear.
It helps to think of there being two kinds of clarity: "big picture" clarity and clarity in the details:
Big Picture Clarity (Inter-Paragraph clarity)
By the time your paper is finished, both you and your reader should both have a very clear sense of
- what your project is in the paper—what you're trying to do;
- what the parts or stages of that project are; and
- how each paragraph fits into or contributes to this project.
Think of it this way: a reader should be able to sit down with your paper and quickly construct a paragraph-by-paragraph outline of your paper: a "big picture" view of its parts and structure. If you cannot do this yourself, then you should not expect that your reader would be able to, either.
Break up your paragraphs so that there is only one major idea in each. (When they make mistakes regarding paragraph breaks, IWU students as a group tend to err on the side of too few rather than too many.)
In order to impose this structure, you should make use of what philosophers often call "signpost sentences": sentences, often at the beginning or end of a paragraph, that provide obvious landmarks and orientation for your reader, and that tell the reader clearly and precisely what you're doing at this stage in your paper and how it relates to other parts of the paper.
Some examples of signpost sentences:
- There are two reasons for rejecting Johnson's view. First, ....
- Someone might object to my argument in the following way ...
- Now, here is how my objection can withstand this reply.
Crisp, clear sentences like these help your reader to understand what you're up to.
Clarity in the Details (Clarity Within Paragraphs)
The development of the ideas within your paragraphs should be clear and easy to follow. Some suggestions for achieving this:
- Write plainly. Read your sentences aloud to yourself or a friend to see how they sound; if they are hard to follow when spoken, they are likely to be too hard to follow on the page. Revise your sentences, polishing them up so that they read smoothly and easily.
- Use signposting language within your paragraphs to highlight the structure of your reasoning. Words and phrases like "because," "thus," "hence," "for this reason," etc. help the reader follow the line of thought you are trying to develop within a paragraph.
- Often the key to clarity is getting rid of the clutter of extra, unnecessary text. Try to identify and remove the "filler" in your paragraphs — those sentences that don't seem to serve any purpose in your project.
- Avoid slipping into obscure pseudo-learned phrases ("it is not unlike", etc.) in an effort to impress your reader.
- If you use a bit of philosophical jargon in your paper, make sure that you explain or define it.
These two types of clarity are complementary, but independent. By this I mean that achieving one type of clarity will often lead you to achieve the other sort, but that nevertheless it's still possible to excel in one of these dimensions (say, by having extremely clear sentence-level development of your points) while suffering from serious difficulties in the other (say, by having a scattering of very clear paragraphs with no coherent plan for their arrangement).
You should aim to achieve both types of clarity, but as a practical matter it usually helps to start out by thinking about big picture clarity first. If you construct an outline or flowchart or diagram that displays for you the structure of your paper before you start to write, you'll be off to a good start. Then when you follow through by writing out the detailed paragraphs, you might find yourself tinkering with the structure of your paper. That's fine — going back and forth between the details and the big picture is almost always necessary for careful writing.