Essay About Late 1960S And Unnecessary Words

Simplicity
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by William Zinsser
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in
unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless
jargon.
Who can understand the viscous language of everyday American commerce and
enterprise: the business letter, the interoffice memo, the corporation report,
the notice from the t bank explaining its latest “simplified” statement? What
member of an insurance or medical l plan can decipher the brochure that tells
him what his costs and benefits are? What father or i mother can put together a
childs toy-on Christmas Eve or any other eve-from the instructions on the box?
Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline
pilot who wakes us to announce that he is presently anticipating experiencing
considerable weather wouldnt dream of saying that theres a storm ahead and it
may get bumpy. The sentence is too simple-there must be something wrong with it.
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest
components Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a
short word, every adverb which carries the same meaning that is already in the
verb, every passive construction that leaves she reader unsure of who is doing
what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a
sentence. And they usually occur, ironically, in proportion to education and
rank.
During the late 1960s the president of a major university wrote a letter to
mollify the alumni after a spell of campus unrest. “You are probably aware,” he
began, “that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially explosive
expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related.” He meant that
the students had been hassling them about different things. I was far more upset
by the presidents English than by the students potentially explosive
expressions of dissatisfaction.