5 Principles for Achieving Clarity in Writing: Sharpen Your Sentences and Improve Your Style

Clarity is an essential part of storytelling. It's the bridge that connects the author’s imagination with the reader’s understanding. You can spend months scripting a fantastic plot, creating characters with compelling backstories, and building an immersive world. Still, if your language is not set up to convey that to your readers, it won’t engage them.

So, how do you write with clarity in a way that engages the reader? In this post, we'll share five principles for clear writing so your readers will be fully immersed in your story!

What is clarity?

Clarity simply means how easy something is to read. As writers, our main job is to get our ideas across clearly to readers. When our writing is unclear, readers will spend more time figuring out what we’re trying to say rather than immersing themselves in the story. When a reader or editor tells you your writing lacks clarity, you might not even be sure what that means. But clarity can be easy to establish if you know what to look for.

The clarity of your writing When we have clear sentences, we have clear paragraphs. When we have clear paragraphs, we have clear stories. When revising your manuscript, once you have the overall story and scene structure, you'll have to go line by line to create clarity at the word level.

Let’s look at the principles for writing clearer prose.

How to achieve clarity in writing

Prioritize the subject

The subject should be the star of your sentence, telling the reader who is doing the action. If you’ve written a sentence with the passive voice, you’ve put the object of your sentence before the subject, such as, “The letter was dropped by the shocked recipient.” Not only is the passive voice more wordy and confusing, the subject relinquishes power, thus resulting in a less engaging sentence.

Use the passive voice selectively, such as when the subject is unknown or irrelevant. When using the passive voice, decide if you are deliberately hiding the subject, such as to stoke curiosity. News outlets sometimes use this strategy as clickbait to catch the reader’s attention so they’ll keep reading.

If you aren’t using passive voice for one of these reasons, remove it to avoid overly wordy and confusing sentences. To fix the passive voice, find the subject and move it to the front of the sentence so the subject is the focus.

Reduce unnecessary words for clarity in writing

Hayley Milliman, Head of Education at ProWritingAid, recommends prioritizing “working” words over “glue” words. Working words contain a sentence’s most essential information. If you change these working words, such as the nouns and verbs, the meaning of the sentence will change. Less important “glue” words include conjunctions, articles, adjectives, adverbs, or other words that you can reduce, remove, or replace without changing the core meaning of the sentence.

While both types of words are necessary, too many unnecessary words make the sentence “sticky.” Milliman recommends that sentences should consist of about 60% working words, with those less important “glue” words only comprising roughly 40% of your sentence.

To fix these sentences, look for overly long sentences. If a sentence has more than eighteen words, it’s probably too long, and even less if you’re writing for middle grade. If you’re struggling to identify the unnecessary words, look for the working words instead: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. These are typically the words you cannot change, reduce, or remove. Finally, rewrite the sentence, reducing those unnecessary words so that the working words carry the weight of each sentence.

Use powerful verbs

Verbs power stories forward. Enhance clarity by using powerful verbs. To ensure verbs are most powerful, remove nominalizations. This is when you take the powerful action verb and hide it within a longer, weaker verb plus noun phrase, such as, “We will make an announcement regarding the winning team on Friday.” Instead, remove the nominalization by writing, “We will announce the winner on Friday.”

Writers also tend to hide verbs by using weak verbs that don’t help readers visualize exactly what they’re trying to say, thus requiring adverbs to get more specific. This includes the overuse of the adverb “very.” As much as possible, let verbs power your writing. Use strong, evocative verbs that say exactly what you’re trying to say.

Make your writing easy to understand for your audience

Readability prioritizes letting ideas shine so readers aren’t focusing on word choice or sentence structure to understand your ideas. Readers often are looking to escape and be immersed in fiction, not picking through it in an attempt to understand what the writer is trying to convey. Carefully select which interesting and complicated words to include considering your audience, and use these unique words and sentence structures consciously.

While complicated words and phrases make your novel less readable, readability doesn’t mean you have to use the simplest words possible. Instead of forgoing interesting words, be choosy with your words that are appropriate to your audience. Choose words that make sense within your genre and audience. If you have a complicated, specific word, surround it with simpler words to improve readability.

To improve readability, reduce, remove, or replace unnecessary difficult words, remove confusing jargon, and use active voice.

Choose specific words for clarity

To achieve clarity, you need to be specific in your word choice. Vague words lack the specificity readers need to visualize the movie you’re trying to create in their heads. Clarity does not always equal brevity. You need to be simple, but you also need to be specific. Say exactly what you are trying to say so that the movie the readers are trying to play in their minds is accurate and as close to your original meaning and intention as possible.

You don’t always need to cut words to be more specific. Sometimes, you just need better-working words with fewer unnecessary words. For example, the word “beautiful” might not be the best word because beauty is subjective, and this word might not help create the image you’re trying to create in the reader's mind. Use simple, clear, active sentences, but ensure that your word choice within those sentences is as specific as possible to best convey your meaning to the reader.

Ready to write your sentences with clarity?

You now have five ways to write with clarity to better engage readers. Remember, clarity should be your most important goal as a writer. Make sure your ideas are the shining stars in your story and that our readers can engage with the story. With these tips in mind, readers will be engaged in your story through your words, creating a clear, powerful image in the reader’s mind!