Plain Language

Writers and writing teachers will often refer to something called plain language, by which they mean to point to the incontestable virtue of saying clearly and plainly what one means to say. To be described as a plainspoken person is still, even now, a compliment most of us would be pleased to own. Such a person and such a written style are simple and direct, natural qualities which we misunderstand as simplistic and artless at our peril.

Plain language is not always simple in structure, but unlike much of the high-flown professional prose we encounter it is in order, both grammatically and logically. The plainspoken writer is one who has labored over finding just the right word for the idea in mind, and who has laid that word in a phrase or clause cemented into a particular sentence with the same care a serious artist positions and places down tiles in a mosaic. One word, one color, reflects another, and the entire work brightens upon a meaning, clear because the writer and artist wanted it clear, wanted to be understood. There are only two causes for turgid language: we are either writing too soon and should take more time to understand what we mean to say; or, in fact, we know exactly what we mean but don’t want to say it. The latter duplicity will rotten out a culture, often with a gathering smile.

When we keep a close eye on the structural elements of our sentences as we compose and revise them, our cumulative paragraphs will add up accurately to a meaning the reader cannot but comprehend. Albert Einstein apparently said that he wrote to explain his ideas as simply as he could but no simpler, and that qualification is important to understand. Writing plainly does not mean that we instantly comprehend the width and breadth and depth of every sentence we cast our eyes over. We, as readers, must work as hard as the plain-speaking writer worked to compose those clear-meaning sentences if we want to understand both the idea and the vantage point from which the writer saw the idea. Indeed, as the author and editor Bryan Garner points out, “simplifying is a higher intellectual attainment than complexifying. Writing simply and directly is hard work…. In fact, the hallmark of all the greatest stylists is precisely that they have taken difficult ideas and expressed them as simply as possible.” (I quote this from the entry “Plain Language” in his Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3rd edition, Oxford, 2009, from which entry I have also taken the reference above to Einstein. Garner includes in that same article a very helpful list of titles which constitute what he calls there a Plain-Language Library. Garner’s own work is indispensable for every careful writer.)

With Einstein’s qualification in mind, let’s look at an example. If one wished to say something about the idea of learning another language, a writer could assemble a number of simple and straightforward sentences like this: Learning another language can help guard against a too narrow view of the world. It is one of the best ways to become aware of the inevitable limitations of one’s own culture. It can increase our sympathetic understanding of others. That’s fairly plainly written, and though there is no explanation as to how learning another language results in the claims of the last two sentences, a reader can readily understand the three assertions being made. Those statements, however, are being made flatly, and that same attentive reader, although perhaps convinced of some logical connection between learning another language and seeing the limitations of one’s own culture, may still not be persuaded actually to undertake the not inappreciable work of studying a foreign language, perhaps because the passage has neither construction nor rhythm that would show the writer’s relationship, the writer’s conviction, to the ideas expressed.

To do that, however, might just require a more complex (not complicated) composition: Learning another language can help guard against a too narrow view of the world, indeed, is one of the best ways to see the limitations of one’s own culture because the vocabulary and structure of each language sets up the world differently for anyone who can comprehend it. And when that comprehension lies deep enough, learning another language will add to, not subtract from, one’s own sympathetic understanding, and ultimately therefore happiness, in the world at large. That version, I would judge, is still plainly written, but more satisfyingly perceptive because of the more advanced (again, not more complicated) sentence structure and punctuation—complex sentences of subordinated structure, internal punctuation that controls those subordinated descents for the reader, and ellipses that mimic the natural, spoken word.

All this is exactly necessary to achieve what Einstein was pointing to in suggesting there could be at times a limit to the act of simplifying, given the nature of what is being talked about and the writer’s own relationship to it. How to find that limit is the work of experience, and perhaps even the renewal of a culture that might wish, finally, to return to the value and pleasure of the mind’s work.

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