H O M E B L O G R E S O U R C E S F R E E C O N T A C T
Timothy Sharkey ・Author
– author of Writing Made Easy: Just the Basics
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Introduction to
WRITING MADE EASY: JUST THE BASICS TIMOTHY SHARKEY “Simplify!
Simplify! Simplify!” is what I always told my
students about their writing in my English 101 and
English 102 classes in college. I told my students
to follow the wisdom of the KISS acronym (as in
Keep It Simple, Stupid). I told my students to
follow the “Less is more” philosophy of Mies van
der Rohe because less is more effective than more.
Less information can communicate a message more
effectively than more information.
Google, I pointed out to my students as well, created a search engine that uses a simple search field in the center of a website surrounded by confident white space and nothing more. It gives people less buttons to push, not more, when searching for information. It creates a more effective user-experience this way. Yahoo’s search engine, by contrast, provides extra information, with extra links and extra ads – and people can decide for themselves which search engine is easier to use. 80% of technology consumers use only 20% of a product’s features, as some experts in the technology industry have explained. Consumers do not like complication. They like simplification. Travel signs in airports and train stations around the world, in the same way, have been simplified and made easy to read in order to facilitate more effective communication. They have been abstracted (reduced to their essential ingredients), designed consistently, and are now used almost universally. Subway maps in big cities like Chicago have been simplified as well to allow customers to read them quickly and to understand them easily. Chicago’s entire subway map has been simplified so much that it can fit on only one sheet of paper. A lot of serious people in the world have taken a lot of time to simplify complicated information in society for our benefit, and we may have not even noticed. Writing should be simplified in the same way, I believe. It should be easy to read and easy to understand. The writer’s job, as a result, is to make the reader’s job easy. It is to communicate a message effectively so that other people can understand it quickly and not find it difficult. Good writing, as we all know, is easy to read. It is easy to understand. Bad writing, on the other hand, is hard to read. It is hard to understand. Compare the following two sentences: “What time is it?” and “What time is it.” The first sentence has a question mark at the end which makes it easy to understand. It is perfectly sensible. It is a question that asks what time it is. The second sentence has a period at the end which makes it hard to understand. It is very confusing. It is bewildering and bemusing, in fact. Even something as small as a punctuation mark can make a big difference in communicating a message effectively in writing. As a matter of fact, simplicity plays a big role in writing already, and we may have not even noticed this either. An essay has one main idea (or one main thesis); it does not have two or three. A paragraph has one main idea; it does not have two or three. An essay’s topic must be narrowed down to a manageable size so that it will not become buried in complexity. An essay’s outline is designed to help a reader keep track of its different ideas easily. Good writing is short and sweet; it is never long or complicated. Short sentences work very well whereas longer sentences tend to lose their value. Paragraphs are indented to stand out as individual ideas so that a reader can keep track of them, one by one. Bullet points on a résumé are designed to simplify a worker’s skills in an easy-to-read list as opposed to in a thick block of text. The 750,000 words in the English language have been categorized into only 8 different kinds of words in grammar – that’s all. Even the rhetorical technique of parallel construction combines three or more ideas into one phrase to help unify the three ideas into a single group. There is a lot of evidence that simplicity plays a big role in writing, and there is a lot of evidence that complication detracts from writing. Complication interferes with our understanding. There are easy ways to explain the technical terms of writing as well – such as a conjugated verb, a gerund, or a split infinitive. I use a noun and a verb to explain the necessary ingredients in a sentence instead of a subject and a predicate because nobody really knows what a subject or a predicate are. I use agreement tips to explain how past participles work (including number shifts and pronoun shifts) because nobody really knows what a participle is. Who could? This word is impossible! I use the person receiving the action in a sentence to explain how whom is used correctly instead of as an object of a preposition because, again, nobody really knows what an object of a preposition is. I emphasize how writing should be easy to read and easy to understand. It should never be complicated or technical or burdensome or discouraging. Only 20% – perhaps only 10% – of the rules of English need to be known by people in order to be able to write effectively. These rules are what I call the basics of writing (or the basic “rules” of writing). They are explained in Chapter 1 of this book: The Writing Basics. The complicated rules of English, for the most part, can be ignored. They can be avoided. (They can be looked-up later on, if necessary.) In the same way that people do not need to know the 750,000 words in the English language to be able to speak effectively – the average person uses about 5,000 words, novelists use about 9,000 words, and William Shakespeare used about 20,000 words – people do not need to know all the rules of English in order to be able to write effectively. Writing Made Easy: Just the Basics, in this spirit, then, presents just the basics of writing and nothing more. It avoids the complicated and technical information about writing that people do not need to know and it presents only the basic information about writing that people do need to know. It simplifies the learning process by using plain and simple terms and it hopes to make the process of writing easy and fun, which is what it should be, naturally. It hopes to make writing pleasurable and satisfying for everyone. It hopes to make writing something that can provide people with more success in life in general. |
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