Writing is an introverted process. We wordsmiths spend hours alone, transmitting the ideas and images in our heads onto the printed page. It's how it's done.
If you want your articles to be more readable, however, you've got to get extroverted. You need to get out of your head and think about the person for whom you are toiling: your reader.
The best way to do this is to read your work aloud. Did you trip over a too-long sentence? If so, that same sentence is probably making your reader feel lost—or bored. Break the sentence into two sentences, or simplify. Let me give you a home-grown example:
"In today's tight economy, many a teacher is, sadly, receiving the dreaded pink slip, which indicates that—unless the financial situation improves—he or she will lose their job."
That's a bad sentence. It's got too much stuff, much of which is unnecessary. If you want to cut, adjectives and adverbs are a great place to start. We all know how dreadful lay-off notices are, and it's self-evident that the mass firing of teachers is a sad state of affairs. And, unfortunately, your readers know firsthand that the economy is tight.
Let's try again:
In today's economy, many teachers are receiving pink slips, indicating that they will lose their jobs unless the situation improves.
Does that sentence feel neutered to you? Maybe a little bereft of emotion?
That's okay. Your shortened sentence has not only assured that your reader is more likely to continue with your article. It has made room for more appropriate and interesting ways to emphasize the developing dominant despair drenching the distressed education system.
Why not add a quote from a teacher who's afraid she's going to lose her house, or a student upset that her teacher might not be there next year?
Call me Britney Spears, because—oops!—I did it again. Two paragraphs back, my last sentence was a bad one. I used words that delighted my writer's soul, but which detracted from my message. By the time the reader has gotten his head around all of those D-words ("developing dominant despair drenching. . .") he has surely lost my train of thought.
We are all tempted to please ourselves with literary fireworks like alliteration or with words that sound long and elegant.
Limit those fireworks to places in which they are appropriate, such as poetry or a descriptive passage of fiction or prose. And don't go overboard. I give my five D-words a grade of D. Want to hear an A? Former U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew once famously called the press "nattering nabobs of negativism."
As for your large vocabulary, don't worry. To write in a way that is readable and enjoyable, you don't have to dumb your words down to the fifth-grade reading level, as I've been told magazines like "People" do. Just use the biggies sparingly, so your reading has a conversational style. After all, deep down, that's what writing is: a conversation between writers and readers.
In Truman Capote's groundbreaking true crime account, "In Cold Blood," he describes a multiple murder that shatters a rural Kansas town called Holcomb. Capote is a genius with nothing to prove except his ability to tell a good story. Thus, he peppers his language with straightforward nouns and verbs along with his more poetic flights of verbiage, as when he describes "a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples."
As a result, there's a lilting ease to his writing, even though it's describing the unthinkable. Here's a short excerpt from the opening paragraph:
"Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled
Speaking of Capote, that brings me to my final piece of advice for writers who would become more readable: Read!
Read good books and articles. This will help you observe how their talented creators keep things simple so you keep reading, and keep their fireworks sparing so that the really unique phrases stand out like Roman candles.
At that, I'm reminded of a stand-out description by another good writer, Jack Kerouac, in his novel that has become an anthem for the Beat Generation. In "On the Road," Kerouac's protagonist says this:
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."
(The above sentence, and Kerouac's book, works because he's also not afraid to simply tell it like it is elsewhere, with meat-and-potatoes sentences like, "It was over a year before I saw Dean again.")
Read bad books, too, from time to time, so you can find out what literary techniques make you cringe. Then, avoid them at all costs!
It's that easy. Think about your readers, and they will repay you by thinking about your work.
