Difficult Writing Is Easy To Read (Once You Know This)

After sinking nearly 10 years into reading unreasonably difficult books, I learned that complicated ideas can and should be distilled into simple writing. If someone tells you otherwise, then there's a good chance that they’re a snob, a dilettante, or a lawyer.

But nowadays, we’re stuck with books written by people who didn’t give a hang about clarity (e.g., philosophy books from the late 1970s). Even worse, they can’t do anything about it now because they’re all dead.

So, the burden is once again on the reader, but that’s okay. Today, we'll learn how to see clarity even in the most turgid writing.

Before we start, there are some helpful prerequisites. In this post, we’ll talk a lot about grammar and sentence constructions. If you want a complete guide, check out my Plain English series, and it’ll give you everything you need to know to get the most out of today's post.

Let’s start with a horrible sentence I harvested from a book I’m reading now:

‘Indeed, the coincidence between the properties of the social experience which privileged consumers may have had in a certain historical conjuncture and the properties of the work, in which are expressed the necessities inscribed in a position progressively instituted and containing a whole past and potential history, and in a disposition, itself progressively constituted through a whole social trajectory, is a sort of trap laid for those who, seeking to escape from internal reading of the work or the internal history of artistic life, condemn themselves to the short circuit of directly interrelating the period and the work.’

In case you've fallen asleep, yes, this is all one sentence, and it’s from Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production.

And before you throw in the towel and call yourself stupid and illiterate, let’s pause and ask: why is this sentence so hard to follow?

In readable sentences, we’re very used to clean sentence constructions with a subject, a verb and an object.

The subject usually performs a verb on the object: I (subject) threw (verb) the ball (object).

And you can spot the same variation in everything you read:

Pierre Bourdieu (subject) is (verb) a French theorist (object).

Do you (subject) want (verb) some pasta (object)?

Even when it's something abstract, the same principle still works:

Pundits (subject) usually have (verb) a really hard time (object) understanding (verb) postmodernism (object).

This is the basic unit of meaning: someone is doing something. Cat + sat on + the mat. But then, problems arise when we’re dealing with complex sentences.

When complex sentences are used correctly, they add specificity to a simple sentence:

The cat, even though it was raining outside, sat on the mat.

The bolded part of the sentence (enclosed by commas) adds specificity, but it’s not essential to the sentence. This is what we call a non-essential clause in grammar.

But if there's too much non-essential information in the sentence:

The cat, even though it was brought home last Friday by Toby’s grandmother (a self-proclaimed cat-lover), who suffered from dementia as she forgot to clock that it was supposed to rain, sat on the mat.  

It creates a sentence that is very hard to follow. 'The cat' is too far from 'sat on the mat', and we might think grandma is sitting on the mat.

So, if we take a look at Bourdieu’s word salad again, we’ll see the same run-on sentences full of non-essential crap:

‘Indeed, the coincidence between the properties of the social experience which privileged consumers may have had in a certain historical conjuncture and the properties of the work, in which are expressed the necessities inscribed in a position progressively instituted and containing a whole past and potential history, and in a disposition, itself progressively constituted through a whole social trajectory, is a sort of trap laid for those who, seeking to escape from internal reading of the work or the internal history of artistic life, condemn themselves to the short circuit of directly interrelating the period and the work.’

If we get rid of all the non-essential clauses, the sentence is still difficult, but not impossible to read:

‘Indeed, the coincidence between the properties of the social experience and the properties of the work is a sort of trap laid for those who condemn themselves to the short circuit of directly interrelating the period and the work.’

In short, Bourdieu is saying that literary works and their history are not directly linked. (e.g., Keats’ poetry is not a direct product of the Romantic movement). This is an oversimplification of the history of literature, because no book can speak for a whole generation, and no generation can create identical writers.

See, the core idea here is easy to parse. You’ve probably thought about this question too, but Bourdieu here managed to make you feel stupid with his layered sentences.

So, next time, when you see a layered sentence, try to distil it down to its basic construction. In Bourdieu’s case, all the bolded parts of the passage are just explaining the properties of social experience and work. When you strip it all back, you’ll see that the core idea is quite simple without the non-essential clauses.

Let’s put it into practice:

(2) Exercises

Exercise 1: Strip it down!

• Find the most confusing sentence in your current book (ideally one that goes on for more than three sentences) and identify every non-essential clause.
  • These are usually enclosed by commas, dashes or brackets that add detail but aren't essential to the core meaning.
• Cross them out or highlight them in a different colour. What's left is the sentence's skeleton: subject + verb + object.
• Read the skeleton first, then reintroduce the non-essential clauses one at a time to see what each one adds. By the end, the sentence should feel manageable rather than overwhelming.

Exercise 2: The One-Line Translation

• Take the same paragraph and write one summary in Plain English that captures its core argument. Frame it in your own words, like I’ve done with Bourdieu in this post.
• If you can't do it, then there’s a good chance that you still don’t understand the paragraph. Repeat exercise 1 until the key idea is crystal clear.