The importance of clarity

As with any other form of communication, if you are to be effective you must make your meaning plain. You could do a great deal worse that follow H. L. A. Hart (the leading English legal theorist of the 20th century), who almost said (and the following version is slightly edited in order to emphasise the point) ‘Where I am clearly wrong, I hope that I may at least be wrong clearly’.

One important contribution to achieving clarity is to keep your sentences fairly short. As we have already said at p. 170, there is a useful rule of thumb to the effect that the clarity of a sentence which contains more than 20 words can often be improved by breaking the sentence down into two (or more) separate sentences.

The pursuit of clarity is hard work and requires a talent for self-criticism. It is alarmingly easy to say something which you did not quite mean, as evidenced by the old story of a judge who had to pass sentence on a man who had trussed up a teenage boy like a chicken before sexually molesting him. Clearly outraged by the defendant’s conduct, the judge began passing sentence by saying ‘I should very much like to give you a taste of your own medicine’. Of course, in oral communication what has been said cannot be unsaid, although instant feedback can result in equally prompt clarification or correction. In the case of written communication, you will, equally obviously, lack the benefit of instant feedback, but provided you develop the ability to be self-critical, this may be counterbalanced by the opportunity to read over what you have written and thus avoid putting the faulty version into circulation in the first place.

Some forms of words repeatedly cause difficulty and are, therefore, best avoided altogether unless you are absolutely confident that you have mastered them. Three examples will suffice.

First, suppose you are given a Subject Handbook at the beginning of your course, which tells you that the course is being delivered through a programme of lectures and tutorials.

There will be a lecture every week. There will be no tutorial in the first week, but there will be one in the second week and every other week after that.

Bearing in mind that you know there is to be a weekly tutorial, you will understand this to mean that there will be a tutorial in the second week and in every week thereafter. However, unless you already knew what it meant, you could reasonably interpret it as meaning that there will be a tutorial in the second week and in alternate weeks thereafter.

A second example is illustrated by the following sentence.

Smith is the second greatest goalkeeper in the world after Brown.

Does this mean that Brown is number one and Smith is number two; or that Brown is number one, followed by someone else who is the greatest goalkeeper after him, with Smith tagging along in third place? Most people would probably assume the first meaning is the intended one; but if this really is the intended meaning, the word second is superfluous. In order to avoid the doubt, it would be useful to invoke the mongoose principle and rewrite the sentence. There are two obvious possibilities, one of which requires only additional punctuation rather than true rewriting. The punctuation possibility merely requires the use of parentheses, to produce

Smith is the second greatest goalkeeper in the world (after Brown).

The rewriting possibility requires an almost equally light touch, namely the omission of the word second, to produce

Smith is the greatest goalkeeper in the world after Brown.

The third and final example involves the use of the word only, which causes repeated difficulties, as the following sentences show.

Only she imagined the threat was real. (This suggests that nobody else took the threat seriously.)

She only imagined the threat was real. (This suggests that there was no evidence to support her view that the threat was real.)

She imagined only the threat was real. (This suggests that she had been on the receiving end of something else as well as the threat – such as a promise – but that it was only the threat which she had taken seriously.)