Clear and Concise Writing
Congenial prose is recherché in these neoteric times. I’ve discerned that a multitude of the populace—from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie—are unaffectedly at sixes and sevens as to what constitutes commendable composition.
Translation: Good writing is rare. I find many people don’t know what makes a piece of writing “good.”
The point of writing is to communicate. If your writing style keeps your audience from understanding the point you’re trying to make, you have failed as an author.1
Look at the first two paragraphs of this post again. They contain the same information, but which is more effective at getting the point across? Which would you rather read?
There are many elements of style that go into crafting good writing. Naturally, I want to focus on the two elements that are most important for the grammar and essay portions of the ACT and SAT. Students who have gone through even a single passage with me will be familiar with my oft-repeated refrain: clear and concise.
Effective writing should be clear—so your reader can understand what it is you are trying to say—and concise—so your reader doesn’t get bored halfway through a sentence. If you have to make a sentence a little longer in order to add clarity or an important detail, that is acceptable.2
On test day, questions about the clarity of writing are most likely to show up as “which choice” questions—where the testmaker will ask you which choice most clearly, specifically, or descriptively accomplishes the goal stated in the question stem. You may also see tone and style questions where the author will use a mixture of stiff jargon and casual expressions in the wrong answer choices.
Questions about concision usually have redundancies and wordiness in the wrong answer choices. If you read the “no change” option, and you don’t notice anything weird3, that’s probably your answer. If there is something weird or redundant in the “no change” answer, look for the shortest4 answer as that’s most likely the correct one.
1 Am I calling out the ACT and SAT for their garbage writing across all test sections that is solely intended to confuse, overwhelm, and otherwise slow down young people? Yes, yes, I am.
2 Of course, most students aren’t taught these skills. Teachers assign a three-page essay and wish students the best of luck. So what are young writers to do? They start their draft and end up with around two pages. Then they add one page of fluff to the essay to meet the length requirement. To restate that point, they increase the number of words—and, thus, the number of pages—in their writing assignments by adding unnecessary descriptors and verbiage to an otherwise solid paper. Alternatively, they make the margins slightly larger, increase the size of the font by 0.5, and/or add 0.1 to the line spacing. To sum up the points I just made, students who are writing essays will add extra words, restate arguments, add superfluous paragraph divisions, increase the margins, enlarge the font size, expand the line spacing, or some mixture of all of these options. Yes, teachers notice when you do this.
3 The secret third rule of writing—after clear and concise—is “don’t be weird.” As you might expect, I constantly struggle with this one.
4 Keep in mind, sometimes the shortest option is to delete the phrase entirely.
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