Improving Clarity and Flow in Nonfiction Writing

Craft and style · 901 words · about 4 minutes to read

Clarity is usually discussed as a quality a reader either feels or does not. In American law it is defined twice, in specific terms, and both definitions name features that can be checked line by line rather than sensed.

The Securities and Exchange Commission requires that the front section of a prospectus be written in plain English. The rule enumerates what that means. It calls for short sentences, definite and concrete everyday words, and the active voice. It also calls for tabular presentation or bullet lists where material is complex, and it rules out legal jargon, highly technical business terms, and multiple negatives.¹ The same rule asks that information appear in clear, concise sections, paragraphs, and sentences, and that headings and subheadings be descriptive. It also asks that a document avoid frequent reliance on glossaries or defined terms as its main way of explaining anything.¹

The Plain Writing Act of 2010 was signed into law on October 13 of that year. It defines plain writing as writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience. It applies to the letters, publications, forms, notices, and instructions a federal agency issues about obtaining a benefit or service, filing taxes, or complying with a federal requirement. Regulations themselves are excluded.²

What that list makes countable

Sentence length is a number. The proportion of sentences in the passive voice is a number. Whether a term is defined in a glossary rather than explained where it appears is a matter of fact. Whether a sentence contains two negatives is a matter of fact. Whether a comparison that runs for a page could be a table is a judgment, but it is a judgment an editor can put in front of an author with the table already drafted.

That is what makes the SEC's list useful outside securities filings. It converts a complaint that prose is unclear into a set of findings about the document, each of which can be shown. An author told that a chapter is heavy has been given nothing to act on. Now take an illustrative set of findings on the same chapter. Its mean sentence runs to forty-one words, eleven of its sentences carry more than one negative, and six defined terms are introduced before any of them is used. The author has been given a week of work with a visible end.

Flow is a different problem, and it is solved earlier in the document

Sentence-level clarity does not produce continuity. A chapter can consist entirely of short, active, concrete sentences and still read as a list, because the order of the paragraphs carries no argument.

The profession separates the two. Editors Canada defines stylistic editing as editing to clarify meaning, ensure coherence and flow, and refine the language, and lists maintaining consistent tone and authorial voice among its tasks.³ The Editorial Freelancers Association describes line editors as working at the sentence or paragraph level, correcting errors while concentrating on improving the language and style of the text.⁴ Organization sits one level above both, in what the EFA calls developmental editing and Editors Canada calls structural editing.⁴³

An author who commissions a line edit for a chapter whose order is wrong receives a chapter that is easier to read sentence by sentence and no easier to follow. The order has to be settled first, and the profession's own definitions say where that work belongs.

The techniques that survive contact with a real document

Three habits do most of the work, and each maps onto something in the SEC's list.

The first is putting the subject and the verb near the start of the sentence. A sentence that runs thirty words before its verb arrives has asked the reader to hold all thirty in suspension. The SEC's preference for short sentences and the active voice is one way of saying the same thing.¹

The second is naming the thing rather than referring to it. Where "it", "they", or "this" could point at two nouns in the same sentence, the reader has to choose, and nothing in the sentence tells them which choice was intended. Replacing the pronoun with the noun usually costs two or three words.

The third is deciding whether a passage is prose at all. Four criteria, each with a threshold and an exception, are a table pretending to be a paragraph. The SEC's rule names tabular presentation and bullet lists for complex material as a plain English principle rather than as a formatting preference.¹

None of the three is a stylistic flourish, and none requires the author to sound different. They are ways of removing work the reader was doing on the writer's behalf.

What an editor decides, and what stays with the author

An editor working on clarity reports what the sentences are doing: their length, their construction, which terms are used before they are explained, and where the same idea is stated in two incompatible ways. Whether a technical claim is correct, whether a figure is the right figure, and whether a passage says what the field would accept are questions for the author and their own reviewers.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including drafts, internal reports, and unpublished data. EditFast works on the wording, the order, and the consistency of what a client has written, whether that is a book or a business report.

The SEC wrote its rule for prospectuses, and a prospectus is about as far from a trade book as American prose gets. That the same six features describe clear writing in both places is the useful part.

References

17 CFR 230.421, Presentation of information in prospectuses. United States Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-230/section-230.421 ↩
Plain Writing Act of 2010, Public Law 111-274, approved October 13, 2010. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-111publ274/html/PLAW-111publ274.htm ↩
Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
Editorial Freelancers Association, Editorial Service Definitions. https://www.the-efa.org/editorial-services-definitions/ ↩

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