Ideas are the most powerfully creations of men. Ideas send men to the deepest oceans, the highest mountains and inspire infinite other feats. But ideas come from the mind. No one can look into another man’s mind. The only way for an idea to have any influence on anything apart from its creator is for this idea to be communicated to others. A man can tell and show another his ideas. But what exactly one says is usually forgotten, even by the speaker, in a blink of an eye. Speech is not a good way of communicating ideas over vast distances of continents and the even bigger distances of time. To make others know one’s ideas hundreds of centuries after one’s death and in yet undiscovered lands one must write them down.
Writing is an immense challenge. Ideas in a piece of writing may be referring to realities of the writer’s World which are totally alien to the reader. Competency of a writer thus must be judged on whether the reader understands what the writer is trying to say. The most general rule of writing thus must be to make the written text independent of any circumstances and conditions which are particular to the writer. In other words, written work has to be timeless.
This is not denying that some writing may have the purpose of only informing someone who is well aware of the situation and is in close proximity. An SMS text message to a friend saying “I’ll be late” does not require any explanation of why or how or anything else. But this particular area of writing is not concerned with communicating sophisticated ideas. The area of writing we are concerned with is the communication of complex thoughts which inevitably requires the quality of timelessness.
In my experience the method of making a piece of writing timeless can be broken down into 4 parts 3 of which are interrelated:
1) Contents – knowledge of the subject matter
2) Structure of the text
3) Language of the text
4) Peer review – get someone else to read it
The writer must fully know what he is writing about. He must be intimately familiar with all the exceptions, counter arguments and all other aspects of an idea down to the most trivial. If the writer doesn’t have this knowledge then the last three parts of good writing outlined above are useless. This is because the last three parts deal with sculpting knowledge into something other can understand with the use of writing. If the knowledge is not there in the first place, there is nothing to sculpt.
The second part of making a piece of writing good is structure. The writer must have a general plan of his work before he writes the first word. Just like a war leader does not launch an attack without clear understanding of his objectives and the ways of achieving them a writer does not start spewing out sentences in the hope that someone will understand him. A writer must have a plan of how he will lead the reader through to the conclusions the writer wants the reader to have. The actual plan will always be inseparably from the subject matter. No two plans will be identical and in some cases may be utterly different. But in general all good plans of texts will lead the reader to what the writer wants them to be lead to. One of my professors once used an analogy I thought illustrates this concept of structure perfectly. He said that one should make points of explanation in one’s essay seem like links in a strong and heavy chain instead of fragile glass beads on a thin string.
The writer is now ready to write. The writer must not lose track of the fact that he is trying to convey ideas. This means that the language he uses to express these ideas should not hinder the reader from understanding them. Rhetorical garnish can easily obscure the ideas which are being expressed and end up misleading the reader. To avoid this writer must stick to a minimalistic approach. The language used by the writer should be neutral. It should not have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the language used. He must cut out everything that can be cut out. The writer must be on a constant hunt for smaller and simpler words and sentences. This may mean spending hours puzzling over each sentence and trying numerous combinations but it is well worth the effort. However, this zeal to cut may lead the writer to cutting out most of the meaning too. To combat this tendency the writer should keep the text concise but not at the expense of clarity, and keep the text clear but not at the expense of conciseness.
After these efforts the writer may feel that his text is as good as it can be. This may be true but he cannot be a fair judge to this. He must submit his text to review of others. The more people read the text the more mistakes may be pointed out that the writer, who is after all only human, may have missed. Another point is that the writer is ultimately writing for others to read so he needs to make sure that others understand his text.
At the end, only time can say whether a text is well written and achieves the aims of the writer but the guidelines outlined certainly will increase the chances of success of the writer.
Writing is an immense challenge. Ideas in a piece of writing may be referring to realities of the writer’s World which are totally alien to the reader. Competency of a writer thus must be judged on whether the reader understands what the writer is trying to say. The most general rule of writing thus must be to make the written text independent of any circumstances and conditions which are particular to the writer. In other words, written work has to be timeless.
This is not denying that some writing may have the purpose of only informing someone who is well aware of the situation and is in close proximity. An SMS text message to a friend saying “I’ll be late” does not require any explanation of why or how or anything else. But this particular area of writing is not concerned with communicating sophisticated ideas. The area of writing we are concerned with is the communication of complex thoughts which inevitably requires the quality of timelessness.
In my experience the method of making a piece of writing timeless can be broken down into 4 parts 3 of which are interrelated:
1) Contents – knowledge of the subject matter
2) Structure of the text
3) Language of the text
4) Peer review – get someone else to read it
The writer must fully know what he is writing about. He must be intimately familiar with all the exceptions, counter arguments and all other aspects of an idea down to the most trivial. If the writer doesn’t have this knowledge then the last three parts of good writing outlined above are useless. This is because the last three parts deal with sculpting knowledge into something other can understand with the use of writing. If the knowledge is not there in the first place, there is nothing to sculpt.
The second part of making a piece of writing good is structure. The writer must have a general plan of his work before he writes the first word. Just like a war leader does not launch an attack without clear understanding of his objectives and the ways of achieving them a writer does not start spewing out sentences in the hope that someone will understand him. A writer must have a plan of how he will lead the reader through to the conclusions the writer wants the reader to have. The actual plan will always be inseparably from the subject matter. No two plans will be identical and in some cases may be utterly different. But in general all good plans of texts will lead the reader to what the writer wants them to be lead to. One of my professors once used an analogy I thought illustrates this concept of structure perfectly. He said that one should make points of explanation in one’s essay seem like links in a strong and heavy chain instead of fragile glass beads on a thin string.
The writer is now ready to write. The writer must not lose track of the fact that he is trying to convey ideas. This means that the language he uses to express these ideas should not hinder the reader from understanding them. Rhetorical garnish can easily obscure the ideas which are being expressed and end up misleading the reader. To avoid this writer must stick to a minimalistic approach. The language used by the writer should be neutral. It should not have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the language used. He must cut out everything that can be cut out. The writer must be on a constant hunt for smaller and simpler words and sentences. This may mean spending hours puzzling over each sentence and trying numerous combinations but it is well worth the effort. However, this zeal to cut may lead the writer to cutting out most of the meaning too. To combat this tendency the writer should keep the text concise but not at the expense of clarity, and keep the text clear but not at the expense of conciseness.
After these efforts the writer may feel that his text is as good as it can be. This may be true but he cannot be a fair judge to this. He must submit his text to review of others. The more people read the text the more mistakes may be pointed out that the writer, who is after all only human, may have missed. Another point is that the writer is ultimately writing for others to read so he needs to make sure that others understand his text.
At the end, only time can say whether a text is well written and achieves the aims of the writer but the guidelines outlined certainly will increase the chances of success of the writer.
1 comment:
What an interesting article; you may like to talk also about the importance of proof reading and spell-checking, as the author who publishes an article with a spelling mistake in his first sentence rather opens himself to ridicule!
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