In a book called What's Left?, author Nick Cohen declares:
“Writers write badly when they have something to hide.”
Is that usually true, I wonder? The statement assumes that the writer has a choice. In other words, that they are capable of writing well, but that they choose not to.
I don't think this is necessarily true.
I was reading a blog post the other day, and after reading one sentence 4 times I gave up trying to decode what the writer was trying to say. It wasn't a particularly complicated sentence. It's just that it had no verb, a strange structure and at least two words that seemed to be the wrong ones. Mind you, as I say, I couldn't fathom what he was trying to say anyway so they may well have been correct.
A couple of weeks ago I tried to read a blog, but gave up after reading the first sentence three times. It took up a paragraph, and contained about seven clauses, several unnecessarily long words and had a really ugly structure. Again, I just couldn't work out what the writer was trying to convey, except perhaps his erudition.
I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so this is all very subjective. But the thing is, if someone is capable of writing nicely, why on earth would they choose not to?
Mind you, I do think that government statements and other official announcements are sometimes couched in language intended to obfuscate. My understanding is that George Orwell wrote his famous rules for writing as a reaction to such practice.
Please note: the link to the book What's Left is an Amazon affiliate link.
On a separate but related matter, I’ve been experimenting with writing a very short story in several different styles, some of which are deliberately awful. Why would I do that? To find out why they are awful. Have a look at these three examples:
This post is an updated and expanded version of an older one.