If there's one writing quality that Nuts and Bolts emphasizes more than any other, it's clarity. Being clear in your thoughts and your words—saying what you actually intend to say, and doing it in such a way that your reader understands you—is your highest duty as an expository writer, more important than beauty or elegance or even originality. Without clarity you're not really communicating, just going through the motions.

And yet many students use a writing style that makes clarity difficult or impossible to achieve: instead of short active verbs (to convey action), subjects that match up with their actors (to bring the main action into the central subject-verb structure of their sentences), concision (to keep the reader focused on what really matters), and a sustained flow of sentences from a single point of view (to keep the story unfolding in a way the reader can follow easily), many students choose the opposite approach on each of these points: passive voice, being verbs, nominalizations, wordiness, and herky-jerky jumps in point of view and time. This wordy, inert style makes it hard for the writer to convey what she means—or even to know what she means, as Goethe suggests.

Saying what you mean

You've got to be able to say what you mean. If you don't get it right, you might end up immortalized in those joke lists flitting around cyberspace, like these selections of mangled English on signs from various countries:

At least these sentences have a good excuse: they were written in a second language. Most students don't have that to fall back on, but over the years I've seen student writing that makes these examples read like Hemingway.

Actions and verbs

One reason why so many students write opaquely is that a lot of the models they encounter aren't very good. More than a few academic writers become so burdened by the terms and concepts they wish to use that their writing becomes a frozen slurry of actionless nouns piled one atop another. Here, for example, is a piece of published academic writing, on philosophy:

It's hard to find any action in this monumental sentence. There's that early may be seen and a few more verbs, even a few subject-verb cores like Hegel served to replicate and he inaugurated. But there's no sense of any action in the passage. Its lack of clarity is so profound that whatever brilliant insights it may have are Greek to us. I'm not sure even Nuts and Bolts could fix this, but if we tried our initial tack would be to have fewer labels and more clauses built around active verbs and clear actors doing something.

If professional scholars can produce stuff like that, it's no wonder students learn to avoid saying things plainly. Here's an example of a student reluctant to say something in the plainest, most natural way. This is the first sentence of an essay and I think she was reluctant to start too plainly. So she ends up with something that the reader has a tough time understanding:

The reader stumbles over best supports. What does best mean here? How does Machiavelli support republics in The Discourses? The answer takes a while to figure out, and only if you know the inside story. One idea the student was struggling to express was that Machiavelli praises republics in The Discourses, but not in his more famous book, The Prince. That explains the best supports. But of course this is only clear to those who know Machiavelli well, and even those people don't get any hint from the sentence that they're supposed to compare these two works.

As we mull over ways to clarify this, we realize that rather than explaining this mostly hidden contrast between The Discourses and The Prince we can just eliminate it, because it's not the point of this essay. With the implicit contrast between the two works not something we need to preserve, we can work on finding a better verb than supports:

The rest of the original opening paragraph shows a similar reluctance to say things plainly:

The revision gets rid of constructions like best supports, explains and supports, two major aspects and that Machiavelli discusses. Formal, clanky constructions like this are fatal lures for students. They sound so dignified and collegiate: but in fact they undermine what you could have said more plainly and effectively. Note that the revision relies on good, strong verbs: praises (twice), had, conquered, and held. Compare these to the much more inert verbs in the original.

Finally, note that the two passages have the same basic ideas, but that the revision reorders and expands a key part of the argument. The original version had given as a list of major aspects (whatever exactly that means) that Rome was an empire and had a strong army. The revision flips the order of these around, since having a strong army allowed Rome to acquire the empire. And while the original merely says the Romans were a great empire, the revision turns this identity into an action, or rather two actions, conquered and held. Using these two active verbs helps us think of Rome as an actor—very much in keeping with Machiavelli's action-oriented thinking. And splitting the action into two parts helps us plan where we're going to go with the argument.

Here's an instance of something similar—gaining clarity by breaking a sentence into easier-to-understand pieces:

The basic idea of the revision is to build grammatical units around logical units by putting actions into verbs and actors into subjects. In the original, women was the logical actor, but grammatically it was the object of a preposition: of women. In the revision, women becomes the subject of the verb in the second sentence: women are claiming. The revision then builds its argument around that core subject-verb clause.

True, the revision is longer, but in and of itself that's not very important. It reads more easily, has some rhythm, and lets the reader pause: a much easier-to-read opening. (Note that the first sentence of the revision is simple and general, and the second starts developing the detailed argument. That's a pattern good writers use a lot.)

Failing to attach verbs to real actors happens all the time in student writing. Here's a weak-verbed original discussing Machiavelli, and a stronger revision that makes Machiavelli the grammatical subject:

Let's diagnose the changes a bit. The original flip-flops its point of view. You don't feel that you're standing on solid ground when you read it; it feels as if you're being yanked now here (a view is coming), now here (someone or something is taking morality), now there (he speaks). The original also treats actions as abstractions divorced from their doers (view comes from and morality is taken leave us fuzzy on that key question, who is doing what).

By contrast, the revision holds a consistent point of view and builds around a real subject performing real action (Machiavelli judges). Not coincidentally, the revision compresses the original from two sentences of twenty words to one sentence of eleven words. More importantly, it leaves us wanting to hear more, unlike the repetitive and inert original.

Here's an instance where the original sentence is adequate but unexciting. The revision sharpens things by using a stronger verb:

The logical actor here isn't a person, but a concept, secrecy. The guiding principle remains the same, however: figure out who (or, as here, what) is doing something, and then write a sentence emphasizing that: the actor as the subject, and the action as the verb.

Grammar review

To become a good writer you should have some basic ability to analyze grammar. Here I provide a bare-bones course in what you need to know. I'll focus on clauses and verbs, because these are the core structures and words on which everything else hangs. (Skip this section if grammar gives you uncontrollable panic attacks. Just make sure you have a reviser who can recognize an independent clause, and who knows how to turn the passive voice into the active voice.)

Clauses are the key syntactical structure of English sentences. When you're looking over a string of words, you should be able to decide whether it's one of two things: a clause or a phrase. A phrase is any string of words that doesn't meet the definition of a clause. Defining a clause is more complex. A clause consists of two parts: a noun acting as a subject, and a finite, conjugated verb attached to that subject. A finite verb is one that has a specific tense (infinitives such as to read are so called because they have no finite or limited sense of time (past tense, present tense, future tense); they are in a real sense infinite). The other requirement for a verb in a clause is that it be conjugated. A conjugated verb fits the person and number of the subject. Girl walks has a finite, conjugated verb, and thus is a clause. Girl walking does not, and is thus a phrase (girl is walking, or girl was walking, are clauses: so verbs can be compounds, made of a participle and an auxiliary or helping verb).

Some examples (the phrases and clauses on each line are not matched in any particular way):

Some phrases might seem to resemble clauses, as in the last three examples in the left column above. They have action (drifting, running, standing) and a person or thing doing the action (cloud, kid, her), right? But the action is not expressed as a conjugated finite verb. These three things—drifting, running, standing—are all parts of verbs, or participles. To have a whole verb you'd need to add an auxiliary: the cloud was drifting, a kid is running, she was standing.

What about the clauses? Note that only some of them sound like (and are) complete sentences. An independent clause is a clause that, without any changes, could stand as a complete sentence—see the first four examples above. A dependent clause, by contrast, cannot stand as a complete sentence because it begins with a subordinating conjunction, relative adjective, or relative pronoun—see the last three examples.

The passive voice

The most common problem in student writing is overusing the passive voice. You've probably heard that before. But it's hard to cut down on the passive voice if you're not sure how it works or how to turn it into the active voice. Thus the following verb tree. It shows the major branchings within verbs and verb constructions. It can help you understand things like the relationship between active voice and passive voice or the difference between active voice and active verbs.

As the diagram shows, voice is a property of transitive verbs, verbs that take direct objects. There are two kinds of voice, active and passive. In the active voice, the subject of the verb performs the action—it is active. In the passive voice, the subject receives the action—it is passive. The same transitive verb can be put into the active voice or the passive voice at the writer's choice.

One potentially confusing thing to notice: some words may be used both as a being verb (Hamlet feels alienated) and an active verb (He felt raindrops). Likewise, sometimes the same word may be used as both a transitive verb (I dropped my backpack) and an intransitive verb (The backpack dropped). You have to look at how a verb is being used in a particular clause to analyze its properties.

The active voice expresses actions in a straightforward fashion. The subject performs the action upon the direct object. In the passive voice, however, this is turned around. The subject, which was expressed as the direct object in the active voice, receives the action:

When you write a sentence in the passive voice you have the option of leaving out the doer of the action. That's because the doer is no longer integral to the sentence's grammar. If you do wish to provide that information, you do so in a prepositional phrase beginning with by, a construction that doesn't affect the basic subject-verb structure:

To emphasize, these prepositional phrases that assign agency are optional. They are not grammatically required (I think of prepositional phrases in general as decorations on a Christmas tree—without them the tree might lack something, but it won't collapse. And just as with blinking Christmas lights, some people go prepositional-phrase-happy).

This quality of the passive voice—allowing one to duck the question of who did something—has long made it beloved of politicians and others eager to seem contrite without actually taking responsibility. Mistakes were made is a particular favorite:

Mistakes were made. . .

Sometimes the passive voice is a good, reasonable choice. It's probably a good choice when you don't know who did an action, don't care, or don't want your reader to know—in other words, when you want to put the focus on the thing receiving the action:

The passive voice can also prove useful if you want to put the doer of the action at the end of the sentence in order to create a bridge to the next sentence:

But usually when students write in the passive they produce prose that is harder to read than the active voice:

Nominalizations

Nominalizations are a major part of what's wrong with lots of student writing. A nominalization is an action expressed as a noun. Any nominalization can be turned into a verb, and vice versa (sometimes the two forms, the noun and the verb, are identical):

As the last six examples above show, nominalizations very often end in -ion, and especially in -tion: abstract nouns like revolution, operation, abstraction, speculation, representation, etc. Thus it's fairly easy to spot nominalizations in one's writing.

The trouble with nominalizations is that by putting actions into nouns, they allow the actions to be separated from their actors. By contrast, if you use a verbs in a sentence, you need a subject: someone has to explain, someone has to argue, someone has to act, and so on (unless you use the passive voice, of course):

Sometimes you may want this capacity to leave the doer out. Depending on the point of view you choose, you might well prefer There was a pounding at the door to He pounded on the door. But too often nominalizations become students' default habit rather than a deliberate choice.

Nominalizations also encourage long, shapeless strings of words, because without the discipline of verbs, one can go on adding noun after noun to a sentence. One may end up with a heck of an ugly sentence that's close to incomprehensible—but you can keep it grammatical:

Since nominalizations allow one to present actions without actors, many student writers deliberately use them to sound objective and scientific. Sometimes that works well. But all too often nominalizations produce stiff, lifeless prose.

Reduction in nominalization use tendencies has as a requirement the expression of actions as verbs rather than nouns:

We've looked at some key elements of the kind of unclear writing students tend to fall into: lack of agency and overuse of the passive voice and nominalizations. We're ready to put these pieces together into the style that epitomizes much modern writing, the Official Style, and its antithesis (and our hero), the plain style.

  Next: The plain style