Clarity

Source: PowerPoint

I fear our high schools do writers—both for business and for fiction—a disservice by merely assigning students to write a specified number of words. Clarity in business writing is important. It’s no less so in novel writing.

Padding our word counts by saying something simple in the longest possible way doesn't help clarity. While there might be an occasional character who speaks this way, most of the time we want to avoid this.

Following is a fun exercise we did for a business writing session at a conference I attended this year. It’s taken well-known proverbs and done a high school student job on them.

Can you figure out what they are?

1. An ignoramus and his lucre are readily disjoined.
2. In the absence of the feline race, certain small rodents will give themselves up to various pleasurable pastimes.
3. A plethora of culinary specialists vitiate the liquid in which a variety of nutritional substances have been simmered.
4. Impetuous celebrity engenders purposeless spoilage.
5. Illegal transgression has no renumeration for its perpetrators.
6. A winged and feathered animal in the digital limb is as valuable as a duet in the shrubbery.
7. The warm-blooded class Ave who is governed by promptitude can apprehend the small, elongated and slender creeping animal.
8. Provide the privilege of affranchisement, or I will feel that life is not worth living.
9. A conditional characterized by tardiness is more desirable than one that is systematically marked by eternal absenteeism.