Clarity: helping your reader understand you
The trouble with clarity in writing is that you can’t see the reader’s face to know if they are confused or not. When we speak to each other, we can see the other person’s response in real time. If they are confused, we can try again, rephrase, explain, or ask questions. While those things can happen in writing, they will happen much slower as we write back and forth to each other. Lack of clarity in writing creates more work–more emails that you have to read and write.
Clarity in writing reduces the number of exchanges you and the reader need to have. And the fewer times you have to read and write back and forth, the more time you have for coffee breaks and crossword puzzles (or meetings or phone calls or whatever other work-related tasks you are responsible for).
So the biggest challenge to writing clearly is working to anticipate how the reader might misunderstand you. You have to guess. Which means exercising your theory of mind–the ability to imagine what other people are thinking or feeling.
Often, we read through our own messages to see if they “make sense”. Does this make sense? Have I explained everything the other person needs to know?
But we, as the writer, have all the knowledge to understand the message. We already know what we are trying to say. The reader doesn’t. The reader will be learning what our message is about as they read it.
Checking for clarity, then, is more about identifying where the reader might misunderstand you rather than making sure your own message makes sense to you.
You have to think about where they might stumble and how you can revise so that stumbling isn’t an option.
Some strategies you can use when you are reviewing your writing for potential misunderstandings are these:
Try imagining your reader takes everything literally. This person will take action based on direct and explicit information and requests but will not understand any implied or implicit information or requests. This person probably won’t understand most similes/metaphors/figurative language, so things like “Let’s get this show on the road!” won’t have any meaning to them. Revise your writing so that this imaginary reader could easily do what you want them to do.
Read through looking for gaps. Where have you skipped, jumped, or assumed? We often leave out information that seems obvious to us, but other people are not mind readers. If you don’t tell them, they probably don’t know. You want to make sure that all the information the other person needs is either within or accessible from (links, references, attachments) your message. For example, I wrote on a video explanation today “Other reasons to ask questions in the rest of this series!” That’s not a complete sentence–the verb “are” is missing. And while you can figure out what the sentence means–that “other reasons to ask questions” will be explained in the upcoming videos–the sentence itself is not super clear without “are”. Another factor here is abbreviations. In professional messages, abbreviations should be spelled out first and followed by the abbreviation in parentheses: SOP (standard operating procedure). Then you can use the abbreviation throughout the rest of the document. But you may not use the abbreviation by itself unless you are 100% certain that the reader knows what that abbreviation means–as in you’ve heard them use it or they used (and hopefully defined) it in a previous message.
Read through looking for excessive words or information. Too much content can be as challenging for the reader as not enough. Because if there is too much, they can’t find what is really useful and important. And since the reader is skimming anyway, too many words might obscure or hide the things they are trying to find in your message. Remove as much as you can–words, sentences, paragraphs–so that what’s left is exactly what the reader needs.
Think about word order. This is probably the most important part here because word order is the way we create meaning. You and I are both using English to communicate right now. English, like any language, is a specific system for organizing information and transmitting it from one human to another. Language is not just in how something sounds or the words that the language uses, but also in the way the language prioritizes and organizes information. For example, Spanish and French use gendered nouns, so every speaker of those languages has to know whether a table or a bridge or a fork is masculine or feminine. An aboriginal Australian language requires speakers to know what direction they are facing when they speak–their verbs include the direction of the action: north, south, east, or west. And a language in Peru requires the speaker to include how they acquired knowledge, whether it’s their experience or something they read or something they heard from another person. Languages function because the speakers of the same language understand (mostly intuitively) how that language prioritizes and organizes information–which words go where. For example, I would never write “where go words which” because those same words in a different order wouldn’t make any sense. While our thoughts still rely on grammar and word order, we interrupt our own thoughts frequently…and those interruptions can lead to our writing not quite making sense.
In the end, making sure something is clear is not about checking to make sure you understand it. It is really about making sure that the reader can’t misunderstand it. To do that, you need to put yourself in the mind of the reader. Think about
what they know or don’t know
how they read and where they will not read
where to eliminate figurative language so that the central purpose of the message is something the reader can understand and follow through on easily
what words are necessary and which ones aren’t
and how the word order will affect the reader’s interpretation of the meaning
None of this is easy, but thinking about how your writing will be received will help you make better choices about how to write clearly for someone else.