Is clear writing clear thinking?: Hold my beer
“Beginnings are apt to be shadowy, and so it is with the beginnings of that great mother of life, the sea…
The outer shell of the young earth must have been a good many millions of years changing from the liquid to the solid state, and it is believed that, before this change was completed, an event of the greatest importance took place—the formation of the moon. The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon’s bright path across the water, and conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember that if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them.
There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean…”
—Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
“Clear writing is clear thinking,” so the saying goes. So popular and seems so obvious it’s got to be as old as writing itself.
Well, it’s as old as anyone whose parents got frisky watching Rocky. The late author and long-time Yale writing professor William Zinsser wrote in his best-selling 1976 book On Writing Well: “Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.”
This seems simple enough, true enough, even neutral—but it shows up in my coaching work all the time as a stubborn writing block. Writers internalize this axiom as the deepest, most important piece of writing wisdom, reasoning, “If my writing isn’t great, it’s ‘cause my thinking must be crap.” Then they quickly proceed to go nowhere.
It’s time to put this phrase down—or at least in context. Each section below explores how this phrase may be holding you back, and how you can think about it differently. I hope this post helps release you from the weird pressure of this outdated idea!
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Writing is different from thinking.
I hear it all the time: “If clear writing is clear thinking, then I have to get my thinking clear before I’ll ever write anything good!”
Rather than being ‘like thinking,’ writing is much slower than thinking, and doesn’t reflect thoughts as we have them. By slowing down our thoughts and externalizing them through the body, writing allows us to observe, clarify, develop, and strengthen those thoughts and the thinking miracle. It is not equivalent to thinking, like a transcription.
But this is how “clear writing is clear thinking” is interpreted, that writing is a 1:1 equation of “thought” to “sentence,” as if thoughts occur as a ticker tape metered out across the screen of “brain,” to be transcribed exactly on the empty waiting inert vessel of “page.”
In fact, when you feel your thoughts are unclear or you can’t pin them down, writing is what will help you work out and develop what you think. In this way, it’s much more like a conversation, where you’re talking to the page or with yourself. This is the most generous interpretation of Zinsser’s original line—that we find clarity in our thinking through our efforts in writing.
You can have clear thoughts and struggle to make them clear in writing.
Often writers say to me, “Everything is clear in my head, but I can’t get it down. It makes sense to me, but I can’t make it make sense on the page.” If they believe that “clear writing is clear thinking,” they determine that the clarity they have in their heads is wrong and stupid, because they can’t get it out in writing. But sometimes we just need to get better at translating what’s going on in our heads.
Here’s an easy way to tell whether your thinking is unclear or just needs to be translated to the language of the written word—can you say it? This is what I ask whenever people tell me, “I can’t write it down clearly!” If you know it’s clear in your head, but you can’t write it, see if you can say it. This proves that your thinking can be clear without your writing being clear yet. That’s because writing, in addition to being a conversation, is also a skill of translation—we focus on how we are expressing the thing we feel or think, not trying to capture it directly, but as closely as possible.
Clear writing is a craft, and it doesn’t always flow naturally and directly from clear thinking. Sometimes it does, when you have an idea and you pour it like water onto the receiving page. But, much more often, it takes practice to take a ringingly clear thought and give it language or make it palatable or digestible through language. You can think clearly and not yet have the practice, skill, or inspiration to use language to express those ideas clearly to the right readers. That’s actually a lot of what we’re learning here.
Because this translation happens on the craft level, it also involves sound and listening, not just thinking. When it comes to getting rid of jargon and unnecessarily complicated language to make writing clearer, or shortening or cutting repetition, we are absolutely using clarity as our guide—but we’re also using the craft rules of rhythm and flow to make these calls. The sound of the writing can help us achieve greater clarity—which again, is different from whether our thinking is clear.
But beyond any of this process and craft stuff, the assumption that you can’t think clearly if you can’t write clearly is ludicrous and offensive. It contains the assumption that without writing, no clear thinking takes place. There is a great deal of clear thinking happening in the world that doesn’t happen through writing. People have been thinking for a looong time without it, and people without written language think and create, and cultures without writing don’t lack executive function or the power of cognition, nor do they lack values or storytelling or humanity.
I don’t like how ‘clear writing is clear thinking’ assumes that if you can’t write clearly you don’t have clear thoughts—this comes from an extremely Western perspective that negates millennia of human storytelling, knowledge, and achievement, and positions some people of a specific skill and ability as “more conscious,” or even more human than others. Let’s not do this, please!
And although I do believe, obviously, that writing is a uniquely powerful tools to help us live deeper, richer, values-centered lives, and to help us heal within ourselves and collectively, much of this is true for art in general. Some people use their bodies in dance to express ideas, phenomena, and feeling, or they create or produce music, act or put on plays, paint or draw or make sculptures, or they support others in these important endeavors. Or, they simply enjoy and use these things that others do as a way to help them think and feel. That’s what art is. There is clarity of thought to be found in all of these forms of expression.
Ok, but clear writing must mean clear thinking, right?
Zinsser says “one can’t exist without the other.” We’ve disproven that clear thinking can’t exist without clear writing—it can. To recap, sometimes we use writing to clarify our thinking (conversation), and sometimes we use writing to craft the best way to express those thoughts in writing (translation). Usually anything you write more than one draft of will involve some amount of both conversation and translation.
So does that mean that clear writing always reflects clear thinking?
You might say, “Of course, yes, that part makes sense.”
But this dictate of “clear” has turned a lot of complex ideas into extremely simplistic ones, especially in online writing and popular nonfiction, and news journalism. The ideas espoused in, say, Outliers might seem clear on the surface—you did it, you wrote clearly!—but they are simplistic, which basically means, “not true” or “a lie.” (This is the kind of bad writing I talked about in “writing away the ego.”)
Average readers (and critics) do not know how to evaluate an argument for clarity versus whether it’s simplistic—they’re expecting the author to have some kind of authority and greater knowledge, so they trust, often embracing and celebrating what seems clear but is actually ‘dumbed down.’
Simplistic stuff is really easy to read and validates our prior position—when misunderstood as ‘clear,’ a conspiracy theorist, neoliberal, or libertarian is born, and incredible crimes against our minds are allowed to live forever on the best-seller lists, which reflects how America’s history of anti-intellectualism trickled down to an assumption that readers are fucking stupid. I have worked with major publishers pushing big books who want the author to think about their reader like a total idiot, and to “write clearly” above all else—by which they mean, “cut out the bits that you’d need to explain.” This kind of “clear writing” does not reflect clear thinking—it reflects bias and the bottom line.
Clarity is relative.
Clarity is relative because it begs the question, “to whom?”
If you are reporting, or writing guides or how-tos, clarity is the most important value for the work, because you are helping people learn something specific and achieve a new level of mastery. Following along is the whole point. But a gesture at “clear writing” (writing economically and without abstract or complex language) isn’t enough to achieve this. To figure out what clarity means for what you’re currently writing, you have to do the work to understand what clarity means for your readers, asking on the macro and micro levels:
what level of knowledge can I assume my reader has?
what do they need to know in order to understand this?
can I assume they have that knowledge or do I need to provide it?
And when it comes to economy of language—making things as short as possible—again, sounds good, but it can lead writers down the wrong path. Do not assume, for example, that all big words are unnecessary or that all ideas that take more than one sentence to explain are ‘too complex’ and need to be ‘broken down’ into a ‘simpler idea’ so that the writing can be more broadly ‘clear.’ This is why writing for everyone usually produces boring, uninspired language and ideas. Figure out who you’re writing to, what they know, and what they probably don’t know, and what they need to know in what order. That’s how you’ll gain appropriate clarity.
Great writing can resist clarity.
We write to be understood, of course, but does understanding only happen in the place of ‘following along with the logic’? Should everything else involved in writing be sacrificed at the altar of clarity?
No. Clarity is a relative value, and it’s relatively expressed. For example, when is metaphor—what some purists might call ‘abstract’ and ‘not clear writing’—far more clear than trying to pin down the thing itself? What bell do you as the author want to ring most clearly for your readers, the observable fact or the recognized feeling? Metaphor is a kind of translation, and it should be used when it’s better than stating the thing directly—and it often is. You have to look slightly to the side of a star for the eye to ascertain its brightness. Often, it is the poetry and play a writer has with language and form that bring us to understanding through feeling, mood, digression, and imagination. And, of course, they make reading fun.
I am not saying all writing is more true or more advanced if it’s more confusing. Clarity is key. But I want you to think differently about how you will achieve it, and what kind of clarity you are actually after.
There’s a client I work with who I think of not as a writer only but an artist. Her writing is clear, she is a great writer, but her project is broader than writing, and it’s not about clarity. It’s about emotion and experience, which are blended; our lives are hazy and loose and in that confusion we often get closest to reality, and find the greatest points of connection.
You might say, “that’s creative nonfiction.” Ok! I’m fine with that. But is it helpful to call some nonfiction creative and some… not? And how does that affect how we see our own options as writers? How does that limit how we allow ourselves to experiment with expression, regardless of the subject?
When Rachel Carson published The Sea Around Us in 1950, her project was urgent. In trying to show the complexity and mystery and magic of the natural world, she was writing against time, hoping her work would urge all of us to act on behalf of the earth. She knew as she wrote that the clarity of her message must reach us as soon as possible: save. the. planet.
But when you read the excerpt from The Sea Around Us at the top of this page, what do you think about it first? Do you think, “Wow, what clear writing”? Probably not. It doesn’t make statements, it doesn’t repeat one point multiple times to make sure everyone got it, it does not use ‘economy of language’ (as few words as possible), it introduces a lack of certainty about the subject at hand, acknowledging that multiple stories are going to be told and the book will try to represent the ways in which these stories are interlocked, and it communicates directly to the reader even though it’s a deeply researched book of scholarship.
As anyone who’s read her seminal work, Silent Spring, knows, Carson’s writing is imaginative, not just factual. Carson did not have time to waste, and yet the pace of her writing does not suggest urgency—her style is a call to slow down in order to witness and appreciate the earth-time that existed long before us and will, hopefully, survive our interruption and continue long after we are gone. Her writing is meant to show us not just the incredible scientific knowledge we have about the natural world, but the feeling of belonging to this world that Carson hopes will inspire us to fall in love with our planet and save what we love. It’s written directly from the heart.
I’m thinking of a book I read recently, The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, an extraordinary book that, like Carson’s work, resists clarity as its premise. In the book’s introduction, Villavicencio writes, “This is a snapshot in time, a high-energy imaging of trauma brain. This book is a work of creative nonfiction, rooted in careful reporting, translated as poetry, shared by chosen family, and sometimes hard to read. Maybe you don’t like it. I didn’t write it for you to like it.”
Where was the author when this happened? Did it really happen? Was she there for this story? What order did this happen in? What does she mean here, what does this story mean exactly? I don’t understand when she writes in Spanish! Do these questions matter at all when faced with the truth of experience, which is always that it’s not black and white, and that some people just can’t understand? The writing itself can be clear as a bell, but “clear writing is clear thinking” has no place in this kind of telling. Confusion is clarity, in these cases, as in life. And, as Villavicencio writes, if someone doesn’t understand something, it’s not always the writer’s fault or something she needs to do something about. Sometimes the reader herself needs to move toward the clarity the author has, and that’s the point, too.
Does the heart resist clarity? No, but the heart knows where true clarity is found—in feeling and evocation of experience. It’s what makes poetry. In fact, you probably have to read Carson’s writing more than once to really “get” it, and you might spend all of Villavicencio’s book wondering where the stories come from—and is that actually bad? Isn’t that the point? Isn’t style substance? If I didn’t believe that I would never read another word again.
When people ask me, “Is this clear?” I ask them, “What do you want to be clear?” and “To whom?” Test your writing against that standard. Whether you write “creative nonfiction” or not, “clear writing is clear thinking” is neither factual nor advice. It’s holding you back from getting out your messy thoughts, and it’s manipulating you away from complexity. You can explain complex things in a clear way, if you consider the reader, and decide what kind of clarity you’re after. But this isn’t a neutral or objective task, and what you choose to make most clear and how are among your most important decisions as a writer.
Carson and Villavicencio are writing about urgent stories that are so complex their telling resists clarity, and about subjects whose futures are so uncertain that telling the complicated truth is more important than clarity—in fact, it is clarity. There is no clarity in the future of the planet or the future of immigrant safety and survival in this country. What service would it do to such subjects to write as if they were simple, just for the sake of ‘making them clear’? There is a place for straight journalism and reporting on both subjects, but it’s not what all writing on these subjects has to be. Both authors recognize that resisting clarity helps us live with and actually appreciate these complex realities, and feel their importance in a place that’s beyond our rational minds. Things might seem clearer closer to the surface, but the truth, the truth that makes us act, is always way down deep.
Thanks for reading! Next week, back with our starting-a-book series, with the last steps before you’re ready to start drafting your chapters! After that, I have a post on prepping to write regularly online, great for anyone who’s thinking about writing a blog, newsletter, LinkedIn posts, etc, or who already does but who’s struggling with cadence, audience, or process. If you have any questions on that topic, please email me at rachel@racheljepsen.com or comment here!
Happy writing :)
