Our screen-addled brains can’t cope with more than two syllables, right?
‘Use short, simple sentences’.
‘Never use an uncommon word when a common one will do.’
This advice is everywhere. Copywriters to fiction authors, across LinkedIn and Medium, love telling people to keep it snappy.
No one has an attention span these days, they say. You’ve got to draw people’s focus so fast you give it whiplash.
Better put a heading here in case you’re bored
We’re apparently heading towards a world where people can focus for so little time that it’ll be the opening word of an article or book that either entices them to, or dissuades them from, reading further.
‘The’? You’re beginning with ‘The’?! How trite!
‘Ecclesiastical’? Much more interesting, but about ten characters too long for me. How much time do you think I have?
The advice about using short words and simple sentences is bad. Or, rather, it’s become bad because people use it so generically that it’s lost its relevance.
It’s like going from saying ‘No running by the pool’ to just ‘no running’. Suddenly up and down the country the emergency services are just shuffling from one crisis to another. In films, action heroes amble away from a building as it explodes in the background. Running Man is remade as Whoa, Slow Down Mate.
The homogenisation of writing
Often this advice is aimed at people who aren’t naturally good at writing, or certainly aren’t practiced at it. And in that context it makes sense, but it’s become something everyone tells everyone.
Tips like this are about de-risking writing. There is less of a chance someone will miss your meaning if your sentence is shorter.
There are fewer elements to parse. Readers can more easily hone in on what’s important.
The same with simple language. More people will know what you mean if you say that simple language doesn’t confuse people, than if you say if obfuscates your meaning.
Which is all fair enough, if what we’re trying to do is take as few risks as possible. But isn’t risking taking what creativity is all about?
Isn’t the fact people bemoan the countless Hollywood reboots a sign that people are fed up with the tried-and-tested? That safely chasing guaranteed dollars is leaving us all feeling rather unfulfilled?
Are we confining creativity?
It’s for reasons like the above that I don’t use apps like Grammarly to check my writing.
It’s not that my writing wouldn’t benefit from a second opinion, but so many of its suggestions are based around the idea that deviating from the norm is somehow bad for a writer.
Grammar checkers have gone from being ‘there should be a comma here’ to ‘try using a more common word’ or ‘being more concise would improve clarity for the reader’.
If you wrote your book on Google Docs it’d even suggest the ends of your sentences for you. The same endings as everyone else was using.
Clarity is only one aspect of good writing, and these tools are aiming for maximum clarity at the cost of anything else. Which isn’t their fault – they’re not built for style, tone, atmosphere or pacing. They can be great tools, when used correctly.
Most things are good advice in moderation
I think we should treat long sentences and advanced vocabulary like we treat any element of writing: sparingly.
Sentence length is one of many tools in our creativity toolbox that we can use to shape the story and our reader’s emotional response to it. Writing advice needs to be contextualised very carefully, otherwise we end up abandoning perfectly good tools.
Yes, writing styles have changed and prose can quickly become dense when all you use is long, flowing sentences. Around the World in Eighty Days has some sentences that run on for half a page or more. That is a bit extreme for modern readers.
And deploying the full breadth of your vocabulary can be overwhelming for the reader as well.
But unusual words help pepper the prose with tone and voice and uniqueness.
And since when is it a bad thing if you come across a word in a book you don’t understand?
Or does everyone have this impression now that they’ve learnt all the words they need, and must be protected from words they don’t know for the sake of their egos?
Language is there to be used, nuances and all
What’s the point in having access to the full breadth of the English language if us writers, whose job is to play with it, only stick to the most common combinations, and the shortest possible permutations? If that’s all we’re allowed to do then we may as well let ChatGPT take over.
So be eloquent. Let your prose flow. Sprinkle in the odd uncommon word. If you want to. If that’s your thing.
But whatever you do, don’t just cut off your access to certain writing tools because some people have decided you should.
Otherwise what’s next? People deciding that the letter ‘I’ is a bit stuck up.
That would be rdculous.
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Cover photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash
