Keeping It Simple

This Monday morning, my mind is on a tweet I read about modern readers passing over quality prose for something simpler, or words to that effect. By asking the OP, I was able to narrow down ‘simple prose’ to that which takes little or no effort to read (sounds pretty good to me, not gonna lie), and this got me thinking about something dear to my heart, namely text readability.

For a bit of context, I started writing in my early twenties, and I really wasn’t very good at all. Not only did I not have much to write about—something that’s improved after a long hiatus—but my prose was heavily on the purple side. That was, until I attended a short talk on text readability, which was a real game changer for me. Turns out I was making two main errors that were leading to chewy, hard-to-digest prose.

One, far too many words with high syllable counts. One or two of these bad boys here and there doesn’t make for much of an issue, but stack them up and the cognitive load on your readers really does go through the roof. Couple this with the age-old advice to avoid the five dollar word wherever possible, and bingo.

Two, overly long sentences with too much material between too many commas (aka as a proliferation of embedded phrases and clauses, or summat like that). Again, this puts extra stress on readers, who in extreme cases are liable to have forgotten what you wrote at the start of the sentence by the time they reach the end of it.

The fixes, of course, are first to dial back on the fancy words, at least in as much as opting for simpler alternatives when they’re available (which often amounts to choosing the Anglo Saxon over the Latinate, having a character ‘go down’ instead of ‘descend’ and ‘think’ instead of ‘cogitate’). And second, as I’m doing right now, to either split those sentences (ignoring the classic schoolroom dictum to never begin one with a conjunction) or to find other means of keeping them from running on too long and containing too much parenthetical material.

Accusations of dumbing down will abound, but I don’t really see a problem with presenting ideas in an easily digestible form if the content and message remain the same. I also don’t present this as something to slavishly follow, checking with religious fervour those Flesch-Kincaid stats available in various word processing programs.

Rather, it’s just something that’s worth keeping half an eye on. I don’t check the readability of my prose at all these days, but in the early going, when I was finding my way, getting a handle on those two main problems really helped me, and maybe it will help you too.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.