The Principle of ClarityWriting & Expression

Every word must earn its place. If a word can come out without losing the meaning, take it out. Zinsser calls the residue clutter, and he names it the central enemy of good prose.

Every word costs the reader a slice of attention. Clutter doesn't only take up space — it dilutes the signal. The denser the information, the more willing a reader is to stay. This is especially true of working memos and decision documents. Your reader has no time to filter your water out for you.

• Use freely in: memos, decision emails, product copy, API docs, Slack messages.
• Use with care in: literary essays and personal writing, where rhythm and repetition carry meaning.
• Do not apply to: poetry and ceremonial speech, where some redundancy serves emotional and social work.

• Hedges: basically, essentially, to some extent — almost always cuttable.
• Verb scaffolding: conduct an analysis of → analyze; make a decision → decide.
• Dummy subjects: It is X that…, There are people who… — lead with the real subject.
• In order to → to. Due to the fact that → because.
• Stacked adjectives. One exact word beats three vague ones.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well (ch. 3, "Clutter"); Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (Rule 17: Omit needless words).

The active voice is shorter, clearer, and stronger. Unless you have a deliberate reason to hide the actor, reach for active first. The passive is not wrong — it is a tool. But the default tool should be active.

The passive blurs responsibility. The decision was made — by whom? An error was found — by whom? In technical and organizational writing, blurred responsibility is blurred action. Pinker, in The Sense of Style, defends the legitimate uses of the passive (old information first, new information last), but warns that habitual passive is the signature of bureaucratic prose.

• Default active: decision memos, technical RFCs, action items, performance feedback.
• Legitimate passive: scientific method sections ("the sample was heated to 100°C"); journalism protecting a source; emphasizing the object of an action ("the defendant was acquitted").
• Watch yourself: when writing upward, the urge to hide in the passive is strongest. The result reads as lack of ownership.

• Using the passive to dodge responsibility — Mistakes were made, Orwell's standing target.
• Stacking passives: The proposal was raised, was discussed, was approved. Make it: We discussed the proposal and approved it.
• Hiding behind a generic "one" or "it": It is believed that… → I believe…
• Burying the agent when naming them would be more honest and clearer.

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"; Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (ch. 4, on legitimate uses of the passive).

Abstract nouns — implementation, optimization, capability, synergy — leave the reader hovering. Concrete nouns — the login button, the 3 a.m. pager, the red folder — let them land. Weak verbs — is, has, makes, conducts — sag in the sentence. Strong verbs — pierce, hammer, shipped, cut — stand it up.

The brain processes concrete images faster than abstractions — Pinker calls it the primacy of the mental image. She cried activates mirror neurons. She experienced a downturn in affect only stirs the semantic module. In technical writing, "the system returns in three seconds" carries more credibility than "the system exhibits a downward trend in responsiveness."

• Strongly: tech docs, product launches, performance self-reviews, leadership updates, brand copy.
• With care: legal contracts (precise abstractions sometimes have no concrete substitute); official formal writing constrained by genre.
• The trap: piling on abstractions to "sound professional." The effect is the opposite — it reads hollow.

• Nominalization: have a discussion for discuss; make a decision for decide.
• Vague quantifiers: a number of, several, multiple. Give the number.
• All-purpose weak verbs: have, make, do, conduct, execute, perform.
• Adjective rescue: extremely effective, highly important. Cut the modifier and strengthen the noun or verb instead.
• Worn jargon: leverage, synergy, circle back, at scale. Once a phrase has faded, it says nothing.

Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (chapter on nominalization); 王小波《我的师承》 (Wang Xiaobo, "My Lineage," on the clean force of modern Chinese — an instructive parallel essay on prose as a moral instrument).

Zinsser distilled the entire creed of nonfiction into four words: clarity, simplicity, brevity, humanity. The first three are engineering. The fourth is the soul. Readers do not read words; they read the person on the other side of them.

The four nest inside each other. Without clarity there is no simplicity; without simplicity there is no brevity. But strip the humanity out, and the first three turn mechanical — you have shaved a piece into a report with no temperature. Zinsser insists, again and again, that writing is not the transfer of information. It is the act of putting yourself on the page. In an age of generative text, that point matters more, not less. A model can be clear, simple, and brief. It cannot be you.

All four principles, applied to a self-review:

An upward update, before and after:

• Universal: any nonfiction prose — memos, emails, newsletters, blogs, internal docs.
• Especially for the independent writer: your words are your reputation, and your clarity is your credibility.
• Adjust for: poetry and ad copy (rhythm and ambiguity outrank clarity); diplomatic prose (vagueness is the instrument).

• Chasing a "professional" tone with jargon — losing clarity.
• Trying to cover everything — losing brevity.
• Refusing to take a position to seem "rigorous" — losing humanity.
• Confusing simplicity with childishness. Simple prose is high-density clarity, not shallow thought.
• Imitating an admired writer's voice until you lose your own — what Zinsser calls losing your voice.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well (chapters 1–5 are the core); Paul Graham, "Write Simply" (extends Zinsser into the essay form).