Learning to write well in college means learning (or re-learning) how to write plainly and clearly. Now that doesn't mean that plainness is the only good style, or that you should become a slave to spare, unadorned writing. Formality and ornateness have their place, and in competent hands complexity can carry us on a dizzying, breathtaking journey. But most students, most of the time, should strive to be sensibly simple, to develop a baseline style of short words, active verbs, and relatively simple sentences conveying clear actions or identities. It's faster, it makes arguments easier to follow, it increases the chances a busy reader will bother to pay attention, and it lets you focus more attention on your moments of rhetorical flourish, which I do not advise abandoning altogether (see the upcoming section on rhetoric).

Finding a voice

Some questions you may have at this point: Does plainness really work well in college? Don't teachers expect a mature, scholarly voice? How do you write plainly when you're doing a paper on gender reversals in Jacobean drama, or European parliamentary electoral systems, or genetic engineering? Doesn't such academic writing by its nature demand complexity and formality?

Over the years I've found that these doubts, not stupidity or lack of skill, are the real stumbling blocks to clear writing. It's not that students can't learn clarity and plainness—it's that they're not sure they want to. You can almost see the struggle going on as they write. Here's an example from a student who wanted to try to write plainly, but who also didn't want to give up the official style. Should she sound learned or friendly? She couldn't decide, and so her essay begins with a melange of contrasting voices:

One is struck by the mixture of clichés, jingles, learned assertions, quotations, plain statements, and schoolspeak. In answer to the question, "Which voice should I write in?," this student tried all of them. She'd lost confidence in her "academic" voice, but she hadn't gained confidence in her plain voice. The result is a cacophony of voices.

Allow me a word of argument, then, if you're doubting whether you should even try to write plainly. The kinds of college writing that this guide troubles itself with—essays and research papers and lab reports and theses and arguments of all stripes—are all varieties of expository writing, writing that explains or informs. That implies certain things. You are trying to teach your reader something, and you want to be understood.

Many students get off on the wrong foot by thinking that the point of their writing is to demonstrate to a teacher, "I have learned what you taught me." Some teachers do want such demonstrations—the more they do, the worse teachers they are. As a teacher, I can tell you that what I really want from my students is not some sort of testimony that they've learned lesson x, but an interesting argument or thought that shows they've thought about lesson x. Teachers are people—interest them, amuse them, surprise them, and you will be surprised yourself at how positive a reaction you get.

Even in academic fields that require you to wrestle your writing into the "mandatory straitjacket of scientific writing," the Nuts and Bolts commitment to plainness will help you. Plainness tends to work better than complexity, both for students and scholars. It turns out you can write plainly and at the same time show expertise—indeed, one of the best ways to deal with difficult ideas is to present them clearly. You might choose to avoid things like the first person, jokes, or playfulness, but you will communicate with your reader better if you can match actions and verbs and present your argument in a straightforward fashion.

Fear of plainness

It's true that plain writing is more exposed. And it's also true that sometimes that can be dangerous. Bureaucrats know this rule well (those that don't don't tend to survive within bureaucracies, as Dean Acheson's dry comment suggests). Students, for instance, soon learn that since teachers vary in what they expect and how much they tolerate disagreement, the most prudent general writing strategy for school is to develop an opaque style that manages to show off a measure of intelligence in its vocabulary and syntax without revealing too many actual ideas in its content.

Indeed, although I prefer the plain style and strongly advocate it for college writing, it's true that in many situations being forthright and plain could get you in trouble. . . .

Send me particularly good examples of safe opacity you come across (and your translations, if possible). I'll add the best ones to the online guide.

The Official Style

Everything we've been talking about—obfuscation, nominalizations, the passive voice, long wordy constructions that muddy up questions of who did what—have been neatly labeled the Official Style by Richard Lanham, a well-known scholar and teacher of writing: "The Official Style comes in many dialects—government, military, social scientific, lab scientific, MBA flapdoodle—but all exhibit the same basic attributes. They all build on the same central imbalance, a dominance of nouns and an atrophy of verbs."

The Official Style is especially prevalent in bureaucracies, because their impersonality, rules, and formal procedures make expressions of individualism risky. Even when it's not really necessary for protection or camouflage, most people within large organizations who have to write serious professional stuff—laws, reports, policy statements, grant applications, police reports, and so on—automatically turn to the Official Style, with its pompous, windy, inert prose. Eventually it becomes a mindless habit. Here is an example from Maryland's Annotated Code of Law.

This is horrible writing. And that's not just my opinion. A few years ago the state of Maryland, trying to make its laws easier to understand, rewrote this very passage. It turns out to have a straightforward meaning:

So how come this plain statement was buried under so much claptrap? Probably because whatever committee of lawyers wrote the law was afraid that if they said it plainly they'd sound dumb and undignified—that people might even start doubting that "the law" is really so hard to understand, or that lawyers are so grand and necessary.

Students are no different than lawyers or bureaucrats. They don't want to expose themselves or sound dumb, either—and after all they've learned to associate status and learning with grandiose claptrap. So they write stuff like this to demonstrate, they hope, that they are smart, educated, and collegiate:

It's hard to break away from this habit of wordy pontificating.

Here's a student displaying that elevated tone characteristic of the Official Style:

Isn't there something a bit gravely silly about her own need of hunger?

Good enough, but we can do even better in stripping the stuffiness away.

A final revision gets to the heart of the Nuts and Bolts style: finding a stronger verb to carry more of the load.

Students often protest that such radical revisions "change the meaning." In a sense, of course, they're right. The point of a good revision isn't to preserve every particle of the original passage, but to be true to the original's core intended meaning. Sometimes that requires scrupulously preserving a single word or detail; sometimes it can mean a more extensive rewrite, as in this example. The final revision deletes she was hungry because the verb devours implies as much. As writers gain confidence in their grasp of words, they become more willing to make these kind of high-quality revisions (which means that to become a stronger writer you need to read a lot, so you can see how other good writers use words).

Students sometimes resist plainness because they're too eager to spill all their ideas right away. Here's a student who's done a lot of thinking on a topic, and tries to cram it all into a too-busy first sentence:

Her sentence bristles with nouns, adjective and adverbs. It has too many ideas going in too many directions at once. The solution is to simplify by cutting to the core of the argument.

One change is easy to see: fast-paced, emotionally tense has been replaced with the more generic powerful, in order to focus attention on the main point, the film's allegorical function. Readers can't focus on everything at once, and a skillful writer should quietly guide the reader to where she wants the most attention paid. There will be time later on to discuss the film's qualities in detail.

The writer still needs to sharpen the sentence, in order to move from a topic (the debate about women's reproductive rights) to a thesis (what side in the debate she believes the movie takes):

What's left is a short, crisp sentence that gets the argument going, squarely focused on the central argument.

Agency and sentence structure

The Official Style mucks up the issue of who did what. When writers do this accidentally, it's because they aren't thinking clearly or looking at what they've written from the reader's point of view. But when they do it intentionally, it's because they are trying to avoid having to flat-out admit who did what—what we refer to as agency. People faced with explaining mistakes frequently duck the question of agency, especially if they're the one at fault.

Here's a good example taken from an insurance report. A policy-holder had had a one-car accident, so no other person could possibly take the blame. But that didn't stop him, in his written explanation, from trying to shift responsibility away from himself:

In the way the story is told, the telephone pole takes on a life of its own. Nice try to avoid a hike in premiums.

An ancient example of trying to avoid responsibility by ducking the question of agency occurs in the Bible. Moses, bearing the Ten Commandments, has just returned to the Israelites from his forty days on the mountaintop. But in his absence all hell has broken loose. The Israelites have made a new idol, a golden calf, and have started worshipping it and running around naked. Moses turns to his brother, Aaron, who was supposed to be in charge. What happened, he wants to know? Where on earth did the statue of the calf come from?

Aaron's probably afraid of Moses, who's irascible and has a habit of killing people who cross him. Aaron doesn't flat-out lie, but he does what he can to minimize his own role in the debacle:

I've always wondered what look Moses gave Aaron when he heard this. There came out this calf. Uh-huh.

A recent example of using language to duck questions of agency—and thus of responsibility—comes from Kosovo, 1999. A young Serbian man said this to an American reporter:

The quotation starts off with the strong we have to accept the facts, a seemingly forthright acceptance of responsibility. But the blurry next sentence is the real heart of the message. Do you notice its careful lack of agency in very bad things happened? Rhetorically separating out the bad things that happened from we, the sentence subtly calls into question the legitimacy of holding the particular we—Serbians, presumably—responsible. In fact by the end it has rhetorically set up Serbs as victims, not aggressors.

Politics is full of such obfuscation. For instance, according to western journalists and human-rights organizations, Chinese commonly torture suspects during interrogation sessions—and not surprisingly they don't like to admit this. Thus official Chinese transcripts of interrogation sessions use an antiseptic formula to cloak the action:

Education takes place. That chillingly bland statement could be Exhibit 1 in how to duck moral responsibility for one's actions. For a classic essay on this tendency in modern writing, see George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

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