to spend a year alone at Walden Pond to become involved with a writer who did. This is the personal transaction that's at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gim- micks to “personalize” the author. It’s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength. Can such principles be taught? Maybe not. But most of them can be learned. Simplicity Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular con- structions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. Who can understand the clotted language of everyday American commerce: the memo, the corpo- ration report, the business letter, the notice from the bank explaining its latest “simplified” statement? ‘What member of an insurance or medical plan can decipher the brochure explaining his costs and bene- fits? What father or mother can put together a child’s toy from the instructions on the box? Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation ‘wouldn't think of saying it may rain, The sentence is too simple—there must be something wrong with it But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same mean- ing that’s already in the verb, every passive construc- tion that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterantstalking or when the action took place. Perhaps Sen- tence B is not a logical sequel to Sentence A; the writer, in whose head the connection is clear, hasn’t bothered to provide the missing link, Perhaps the writer has used a word incorrectly by not taking the trouble to look it up. Faced with such obstacles, readers are at first tenacious. They blame themselves—they obviously missed something, and they go back over the mysti- fying sentence, or over the whole paragraph, piecing it out like an ancient rune, making guesses and mov- ing on. But they won't do that for long, The writer is making them work too hard, and they will look for ‘one who is better at the craft. Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it? Is it clear to someone encounter- ing the subject for the first time? If it’s not, some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery. The clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to see this stuff for what it is: fuzz, I don’t mean that some people are born clear- headed and are therefore natural writers, whereas others are naturally fuzzy and will never write well. Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves, as if they were working on any other project that requires logic: making a shopping list or doing an algebra problem. Good writing doesn’t come naturally, though most people seem to think it does. Professional writers are constantly bearded by people who say they'd like to “try a little writing sometime”—meaning when they retire from their real profession, like insurance or real estate, which is hard. Or they say, “I could write a book about that.” I doubt it, ‘Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no acci- dent. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. = Role es ‘og avec rd ont toes Batan So ee ‘Two pages of the final manuscript ofthis chapter from the First Ealition of On Writing Well Although they look like a first draft, they had already been rewritten and retyped-like almost every ‘other page—four or five times. With each rewrite I try to make ‘what have written tighter, stronger and more precise, elimi inating every element that’s not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at hhow much clutter can still be cut. (In later editions I eliminated the sexist pronoun “he” denoting “the writer” and “the reader") Clutter Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech. Consider what President Nixon’s aide John Dean accomplished in just one day of testimony on television during the Watergate hearings. The next day everyone in America was saying “at this point in time” instead of “now.” Consider all the prepositions that are draped onto verbs that don’t need any help. We no longer head committees. We head them up. We don’t face prob- lems anymore. We face up to them when we can free up a few minutes. A small detail, you may say—not worth bothering about. It is worth bothering about. ‘Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there. “Up” in “free up” shouldn't be there. Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising num- ber that don’t serve any purpose. Take the adjective “personal,” as in “a personal friend of mine,” “his personal feeling” or “her per- sonal physician.” It’s typical of hundreds of words that can be eliminated. The personal friend has comeinto the language to distinguish him or her from the business friend, thereby debasing both language and friendship. Someone's feeling is that person’s per- sonal feeling—that’s what “his” means. As for the personal physician, that’s the man or woman sum- moned to the dressing room of a stricken actress so she won't have to be treated by the impersonal physi- cian assigned to the theater. Someday I'd like to see that person identified as “her doctor.” Physicians are physicians, friends are friends. The rest is clutter. Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing. Even before John Dean, people and businesses had stopped saying “now.” They were saying “currently” (“all our operators are currently assisting other customers”), or “at the present time,” or “presently” (which ‘means “soon”), Yet the idea can always be expressed by “now” to mean the immediate moment (“Now 1 can see him”), or by “today” to mean the historical present (“Today prices are high”), or simply by the verb “to be” (“It is raining”). There’s no need to say, "At the present time we are experiencing precipitation.” “Experiencing” is one of the worst clutterers. Even your dentist will ask if you are experiencing any If he had his own kid in the chair he would say, “Does it hurt?” He would, in short, be himself. By using a more pompous phrase in his professional role he not only sounds more important; he blunts the painful edge of truth. It’s the language of the flight attendant demonstrating the oxygen mask that will drop down if the plane should run out of air. “In the unlikely possibility that the aircraft should experi- ence such an eventuality,” she begins—a phrase so oxygen-depriving in itself that we are prepared for any disaster. Clutter is the ponderous euphemism that turns a slum into a depressed socioeconomic area, garbage collectors into waste-disposal personnel and the town dump into the volume reduction unit. I think of Bill Mauldin’s cartoon of two hoboes riding a freight car. One of them says, “I started as a simple bum, but now I'm hard-core unemployed.” Clutter is political correctness gone amok. I saw an ad for a boys’ camp designed to provide “individual attention for the ‘minimally exceptional.” Clutter is the official language used by corpora- tions to hide their mistakes. When the Digital Equip- ment Corporation eliminated 3,000 jobs its statement didn’t mention layoffs; those were “invol- untary methodologies.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.” When General Motors had a plant shutdown, that was a “volume-related production-schedule adjust- ment.” Companies that go belly-up have “a negative cash-flow position.” Clutter is the language of the Pentagon calling an invasion a “reinforced protective reaction strike” and justifying its vast budgets on the need for “counter- force deterrence.” As George Orwell pointed out in “Politics and the English Language,” an essay written in 1946 but often cited during the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam and Iraq, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.... Thus politi- cal language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Orwell’s warning that clutter is not just a nuisance but a deadly tool has come true in the recent decades of American military adventurism. It was during George W. Bush’s presidency that “civilian casual- ties” in Iraq became “collateral damage.”Verbal camouflage reached new heights during General Alexander Haig’s tenure as President Rea~ gan's secretary of state. Before Haig nobody had thought of saying “at this juncture of maturization” to mean “now.” He told the American people that terrorism could be fought with “meaningful sanc- tionary teeth” and that intermediate nuclear missiles were “at the vortex of cruciality.” As for any worries that the public might harbor, his message was “leave it to Al,” though what he actually said was: “We must push this to a lower decibel of public fixation. I don’t think there's much of a learning curve to be achieved in this area of content.” T could go on quoting examples from various fields—every profession has its growing arsenal of jargon to throw dust in the eyes of the populace. But the list would be tedious. The point of raising it now is to serve notice that clutter is the enemy. Beware, then, of the long word that’s no better than the short word: “assistance” (help), “numerous” (many), “fa- cilitate” (ease), “individual” (man or woman), “re- winder” (rest), “initial” (first), “implement” (do), “sufficient” (enough), “attempt” (try), “referred to as” (called) and hundreds more. Beware of all the slippery new fad words: paradigm and parameter, pi oritize and potentialize. They are all weeds that will smother what you write. Don’t dialogue with some- ‘one you can talk to, Don’t interface with anybody. Just as insidious are all the word clusters with which we explain how we propose to go about our explaining: “I might add,” “It should be pointed out,” “It is interesting to note.” If you might add, add it. If it should be pointed out, point it out. If it is interest- ing to note, make it interesting; are we not all stupe- fied by what follows when someone says, “This will interest you”? Don’t inflate what needs no inflating “with the possible exception of” (except), “due to the fact that” (because), “he totally lacked the ability to” (he couldn't), “until such time as” (until), “for the purpose of” (for). Is there any way to recognize clutter at a glance? Here’s a device my students at Yale found helpful. 1 would put brackets around every component in a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. Often just one word got bracketed: the unnecessary prepo- sition appended to a verb (‘order up”), or the adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb (“smile happily”), or the adjective that states a known fact (tall skyscraper”). Often my brackets surrounded the little qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit (“a bit,” “sort of”), or phrases like “in a sense,” which don’t mean anything. Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentence—the one that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that says something readers don’t need to know or can figure out for themselves. Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice. ‘My reason for bracketing the students’ superflu- ous words, instead of crossing them out, was to avoid violating their sacred prose. I wanted to leave the sentence intact for them to analyze. I was saying, “I may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the meaning won't be affected. But you decide. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works.” In the early weeks of the term I handed back papers that were festooned with brackets. Entire paragraphs were bracketed. But soon the students learned to put mental brackets around their own clut- ter, and by the end of the term their papers were almost clean. Today many of those students are pro-