Writing a clear sentence

Intuition [Beginner]

A sentence has one job: get an idea from your head into the reader's head without losing anything along the way. The clearest sentences name who or what is doing something, then say what they are doing. Everything else is decoration, and decoration that obscures the core action has to go.

Read this:

The implementation of the new policy was carried out by the committee.

Who did what? A committee implemented a policy. That is the entire thought. The sixteen-word version buries the actor behind a string of nouns and a passive verb. The seven-word version puts the actor up front and the action right behind it.

Three habits produce clear sentences:

1. Name the actor. Make the subject of the sentence the person or thing performing the action.
2. Use a strong verb. Choose a verb that carries meaning instead of leaning on a vague one plus a noun.
3. Cut everything that does no work. If removing a word or phrase changes nothing about the reader's understanding, it was dead weight.

Clarity is not about writing short sentences for their own sake. A long sentence can be perfectly clear if every word earns its place and the grammatical structure keeps the logic visible.

Visual [Beginner]

Cluttered sentence:
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| The making of a decision was undertaken by the manager        |
|  [actor buried]  [weak verb]  [nominalization]     [who?]    |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
         |
         v  revision
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| The manager decided.                                           |
|  [actor up front]  [strong verb]                               |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

Sentence anatomy:
  Subject (actor)  +  Verb (action)  +  Object (receiver)
  --------------------------------------------------------
  The student        submitted        the essay.
  Research           confirms         the hypothesis.
  Gravity            pulls            objects downward.

Active vs. Passive voice:
  Active:   The pitcher threw the ball.     (actor acts)
  Passive:  The ball was thrown by the pitcher.  (actor tagged on)
  Passive (agentless): The ball was thrown.  (actor vanished)

Worked example [Beginner]

Example 1: Cutting clutter

Original: It is important to note that the results of the experiment are indicative of a trend toward increased efficiency.

Step-by-step revision:

• "It is important to note that" -- cut. The sentence that follows is what is important.
• "are indicative of a trend toward" -- replace with "show" or "suggest."
• "increased efficiency" -- keep, or shorten to "higher efficiency."

Revised: The results suggest higher efficiency.

Sixteen words became five. The meaning is identical.

Example 2: Active vs. passive

Passive: The report was written by the intern, and the data were analyzed by the team.

Active: The intern wrote the report, and the team analyzed the data.

Example 3: Concrete vs. abstract language

Abstract: A negative impact was observed on the financial situation of the organization.

Concrete: The charity lost $40,000.

Example 4: Avoiding nominalizations

Nominalization (noun made from a verb): We made a decision to proceed with the implementation.

Verbs restored: We decided to proceed. Or: We decided to implement it.

Common nominalizations to watch for: make a decision (decide), give an explanation (explain), come to a conclusion (conclude), make an adjustment (adjust), perform an analysis (analyze).

Check your understanding [Beginner]

Formal definition [Intermediate+]

A sentence is a grammatically complete unit consisting of at minimum a subject and a predicate. Sentence clarity obtains when the reader can identify the following without re-reading:

1. The topic -- what the sentence is about (typically the grammatical subject).
2. The action -- what the topic is doing or what is being said about it (typically the verb phrase).
3. The stress -- the point of maximum information, which readers expect near the end of the sentence.

Williams and Bizup identify two principles that govern clarity at the sentence level:

• The actor-action principle: When a sentence expresses an action, readers comprehend it most readily when the grammatical subject names the actor and the verb names the action.
• The old-before-new principle: Readers process sentences more easily when familiar (old) information precedes unfamiliar (new) information, with the newest, most important information landing at the end.

Nominalization is the conversion of a verb or adjective into a noun (e.g., "decide" to "decision," "implement" to "implementation"). Nominalizations are not errors; they become problems when they replace verbs that could carry the same meaning more directly, or when they string together into "noun stacks" that force the reader to unpack multiple layers of meaning simultaneously.

Voice is a grammatical category indicating the relationship between the verb's action and its subject. In the active voice, the subject performs the action. In the passive voice, the subject receives the action. Passive voice is appropriate when the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or deliberately backgrounded (e.g., "The vase was broken" when the identity of the breaker is not the point). It becomes a clarity problem when it obscures the actor that the reader needs to know about.

Key concepts [Intermediate+]

• Subject-verb clarity: The grammatical subject names the actor; the verb names the action. When this alignment breaks, the reader must work to reconstruct who did what.
• Nominalization: Converting verbs to nouns (decide -> decision). Useful in some contexts; habitual use creates wordy, abstract prose.
• Active voice preference: Default to active voice. Use passive voice deliberately when the actor is irrelevant or when you want to foreground the receiver of the action.
• Concrete vs. abstract language: Concrete language names specific, perceivable things. Abstract language names categories, qualities, or concepts. Both are necessary; unclear writing leans too heavily on the abstract.
• Old-before-new principle: Begin sentences with information the reader already knows or can readily infer; end with the new point you want to stress.
• Metadiscourse: Language about language ("it is important to note," "in this section we will discuss"). Often removable without loss of meaning.

Rhetorical theory [Master]

The concern for sentence-level clarity has deep roots. Aristotle's discussion of lexis (word choice and arrangement) in Book III of the Rhetoric treats clarity as the first virtue of prose style, though he notes that metaphor and unusual diction can serve clarity by making the familiar strange enough to see freshly. The tension between plainness and ornament runs through the entire Western rhetorical tradition.

Richard Lanham, in Revising Prose (1979), identifies what he calls the "Official Style" -- the noun-heavy, passive-heavy prose characteristic of bureaucracy and academia -- and attributes it to institutional incentives that reward the appearance of seriousness over actual communication. His paramedic method ("Who kicks who?") is a practical tool for diagnosing the problem, but his deeper argument is sociological: unclear writing persists because institutions reward it.

Joseph Williams, in Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (first edition 1981, later editions with Gregory Bizup), builds a more systematic account. Williams distinguishes five levels of style (clarity, cohesion, emphasis, coherence, and concision) and argues that each can be taught through conscious principles rather than learned only through immersion. His approach has been influential in composition pedagogy, though critics argue that his principles, while descriptively accurate, may oversimplify the relationship between grammatical form and reader comprehension.

A significant counter-tradition questions whether clarity is always the highest value. Poststructuralist critics, drawing on readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, argue that "clarity" is itself a rhetorical effect -- that prose which seems transparent is actually performing complex ideological work by making its constructions appear natural. This critique does not invalidate the practical goal of writing clear sentences, but it complicates the assumption that clarity is ideologically neutral.

In composition studies, the "process movement" of the 1970s and 1980s (Emig, Murray, Flower and Hayes) shifted pedagogical emphasis from finished products to writing processes, which had the indirect effect of relativizing sentence-level concerns. If revision is recursive and ongoing, then sentence clarity becomes something achieved through multiple drafts rather than demanded of the first one. Current-traditional rhetoric, by contrast, treats the sentence as the primary unit of composition instruction, a view that the process movement challenged but never fully displaced.

Historical context [Master]

The Western obsession with sentence clarity can be traced to two sources. The first is the classical rhetorical tradition: Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all treat clarity (perspicuitas) as the foundational virtue of prose. The second is the plain-language movement, which emerged in twentieth-century Anglo-American contexts as a response to bureaucratic and legal writing that was inaccessible to ordinary citizens.

In 1946, George Orwell published "Politics and the English Language," arguing that vague, pretentious prose enables vague, pretentious thinking -- and, by extension, political deception. Orwell's essay became a touchstone for advocates of plain language, though linguists have noted that his own prose sometimes violates the rules he proposes, and that his account of linguistic determinism (the idea that language shapes thought in a straightforward way) is linguistically naive.

The United States Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires federal agencies to use clear communication in documents intended for the public. Similar legislation exists in other English-speaking countries. These laws reflect a policy judgment that unclear writing is not merely an aesthetic failing but a barrier to civic participation.

In pedagogical history, sentence-level instruction was dominant in American composition teaching from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s (the "current-traditional" paradigm). The process movement of the 1970s displaced some of this emphasis, but sentence-level rhetoric has returned through the work of scholars like Williams, Lanham, and Helen Sword, who combine attention to prose craft with awareness of the social contexts that produce bad writing.

Bibliography [Master]

• Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. Book III, on lexis and style.
• Lanham, Richard A. Revising Prose. 5th ed. New York: Pearson, 2007.
• Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language." Horizon 13, no. 76 (1946): 252-265.
• Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 4th ed. New York: Longman, 2000.
• Williams, Joseph M., and Gregory G. Colomb. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 12th ed. New York: Pearson, 2019.
• Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." College Composition and Communication 32, no. 4 (1981): 365-387.