But with an already pared down and well-organized text
the same stance can have different effects. Cut out all
unnecessary words, leave only what is strictly essential
(no asides, no ‘for examples’, no flavouring), and you may
end up with a piece of writing too dense or too formal for
many readers to make inroads. Journal editors and referees
often stress this kind of paring away of closely written text.
But it can produce excessively hard-boiled, remote,
underexplained and unnecessarily difficult pieces of text.
As de Botton notes in the epigraph to this section, making
life hard for readers will trigger two reactions, neither of
them encouraging for the reception of your text. If readers
blame you as author for being obscure there is a direct threat
to your passing the final examination without having to
make revisions. If readers blame themselves for not being
able to measure up to your text, this may rebound in
unsympathetic views of your work. Triggering realizations
we would all prefer to avoid is not a way to get widely read.
◆ The ‘say it once and say it right’ approach urges you not to
blur the argumentative impact of a single connected set of
points about X by dissipating them in dribs and drabs, a
little bit here and then again there and somewhere else a
third time. Instead you should pull together all the related
little ‘x’s into one, big bloc X argument. In weakly organized
text this idea can again be a great force for good. Nothing is
so corrosive of readers’ confidence in an author than the
feeling that they are simply re-encountering material already
described in a disorganized text, or are revisiting in only a
marginally varied form points made already, perhaps for the
third, fourth or fifth time. But some degree of linkaging
back and forth across a text is inevitable and necessary. For
instance, cross-referencing and short ‘reminder’ passages can
often be justified on the ‘need to know’ criterion. Radically
overdoing a ‘say it once and say it right’ logic may
sometimes push an already well-structured text into
inaccessibility, denying readers the ‘warm-up’ links that they
need to grasp a wider pattern of argument.
◆ A concern to maximize the originalityof your text is a positive
impulse so long as it is well-grounded and your efforts focus
on clarifying and framing the value-added elements of your
WRITING CLEARLY◆ 109