# Make Complexity Followable

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 53 · Part 6: Language, voice, and style

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> Clarity does not simplify thought; it makes complexity followable.

A writer can get worse at clarity by believing it is a polite word for simplicity, so that a clear writer must say less, or by believing the mirror image, that real thought is hard and difficulty on the page is evidence of depth. Both beliefs treat clarity as a property of the ideas. We would place it in the relations between them.

> Sample (invented): Notwithstanding antecedent procedural irregularities, the sustained diminution of institutional legitimacy is attributable principally to perceived arbitrariness in the application of remedial measures.
>
> Sample (invented): People stopped trusting the court because it applied its remedies differently to similar cases, and they had already watched it break its own procedures.

The second sample is about as complex as the first and keeps both ideas, the broken procedures and the uneven remedies. It adds who did what and which thing caused which, through “because,” “and,” “already.” Words that carry relations, such as *because, although, so, unless, which means*, are small and easy to cut without noticing, and without them the reader has to infer a structure the writer never wrote down.

Length is no bar. Darwin wrote a sentence of sixty-six words that, in our judgment, an attentive reader can follow in one pass at ordinary speed; the last paragraph of *On the Origin of Species* (1859) begins with it, by our count. It asks the reader to contemplate “an entangled bank,” and by its end to reflect “that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.” The sentence has one governing idea, that it is interesting to contemplate this and to reflect on that. The long middle is a list of parallel “with” phrases, each an image you can see, plants of many kinds, birds singing on the bushes, insects flitting about, worms crawling through damp earth, and on our reading the reader holds the pattern rather than the contents. The thought that demands the most, that unlike things are produced by one set of laws, comes after those images and just before the full stop. In Williams and Bizup’s general form of the point, readers prefer to begin sentences with what they already know and to end them with what is new and complex.

A mystery keeps the culprit back, a lyric essay leaps between images and trusts the reader to build the bridge, and a research article may use a hard term of art because its readers came for the term. Followable is relative to the reader the Work has promised (Practice 16), and some difficulty is the point (Practice 95). What you can’t defend is accidental difficulty, where the reader cannot tell whether a gap is a design or a slip. If you leave out a connection, leave it out where the reader can tell you meant to.

**Practice.** Take one page of exposition or argument of your own. Between every pair of consecutive sentences, write in the margin the relation you could state: *and* (adds), *but* (contrasts), *so* (consequence), *because* (reason), *for example*, *which means*, *then* (time). Where you cannot name one, write a question mark. Count the question marks. Each is a place where the reader must work alone, and each has one of two causes, a connective you forgot to write or a step you forgot to think. Supply the connective or the step. For a scene of fiction, run the same test with *then*, *so*, *but* and *meanwhile*. Fifteen minutes.

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