The Cost of Being Clear

There is a particular vanity in complication, and most of us are guilty of it long before we are old enough to notice. We mistake the number of our words for the weight of our thought, and then we defend the confusion as depth. It is a comfortable error because it flatters everyone at once: the writer for his subtlety, the reader for keeping up.

I have come to believe the opposite. Clarity is not the absence of difficulty; it is difficulty that has been paid for in advance. The lucid sentence is expensive. Someone has done the labour of understanding, quietly and out of sight, so that the reader need not do it again.

Consider how rarely we thank a person for being clear. We reserve our admiration for the dazzling talker, the one who leaves us impressed and slightly lost, as though our own confusion were proof of his brilliance rather than a symptom of his self-regard.

But brilliance that leaves you stranded is a species of theft. It takes your attention and hands back nothing you can carry home. The genuinely clear writer does the reverse: he returns your own mind to you, enlarged, and asks for no applause on the way out.

To distil an idea is not to shrink it. Distillation removes the water, not the spirit; what remains is smaller in volume and greater in strength. The reduction is the art. Anyone can add; the discipline lies entirely in what one is willing to boil away.

I think of the years I spent hoarding qualifications such as perhaps, arguably, and in a certain sense, as though a naked statement might be arrested for indecency. Each hedge felt, at the time, like modesty. It was mostly fear wearing modesty’s coat.

A provisional sentence protects its author. It cannot be wrong, because it has not quite said anything; but it cannot be useful either, and for exactly the same reason. There is a courage in the plain declarative that has nothing whatever to do with volume.

Cadence matters here more than most people suppose. A clear thought asks for a clear rhythm: short where the idea turns, longer where it gathers itself. The salient point should fall where the breath falls, so that the ear agrees a half-second before the mind has finished arguing.

This is why the most temperate speakers are so often the most persuasive. They do not raise the voice; they place the emphasis. Force, on the page as in the room, is a matter of position, not of pressure, a truth every shouting man discovers too late.

There is a discipline, too, in leaving things out. Every superfluous clause is a small insult to the reader’s intelligence, a quiet suggestion that they cannot be trusted to reach the destination without an escort walking them the whole way.

And yet economy can harden into coldness. The essay pared to the bone stops nourishing; the reader is fed accuracy and sent away hungry. Somewhere between the flood and the drought lies the sentence one can actually live in, and finding it is the work of a life, not of an afternoon.

I do not always manage it. I reread my own paragraphs and find the water still standing in them, the hedges still planted, the old fear disguised, as ever, as care. The standard, once seen, refuses to be unseen. That is its cruelty and its use.

That, in the end, is what the labour is for. Not elegance, which is only a by-product, but courtesy: the decision to spend your effort in private so that a stranger need not spend theirs. You cannot afford the clear sentence, and you write it anyway because the reader’s time was never yours to waste.