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Clarity is the most important rule of good writing. If what you write is not clear, you might as well not waste the reader’s time. Worse, you could do some damage. Take, for instance, a flyer I received from my credit union. One of the headlines read:

We now offer less-than-perfect credit loans.

My immediate reaction was: “Why would I want to do business with a credit union that wants its customers to sign up for loans that are less than perfect?” Of course, what the writer meant to say was …

We now offer loans for people with less-than-perfect credit.

Ambiguities in writing crop up all the time, leaving the door wide open for misinterpretations or unanswered questions. In many cases, this sort of problem is simply the result of sloppy writing.

Sam stumbled out of the tent and shot the bear in his pajamas.

What’s wrong with the preceding sentence? Right – bears don’t wear pajamas. On the other hand, we can only hope that Sam was wearing pajamas. The mental image of a naked camper stumbling out of a tent, gun blazing, is the stuff of nightmares. And certainly, had the bear survived the shooting, the memory would have emotionally scarred it for life.

“Sam stumbled out of the tent in his pajamas and shot the bear” would be much more palatable for all concerned.

How about the following gem of reporting?

Fred and Jim fought over Sadie at the Midnight Bar. When he pulled out a knife, she shot him.

Again, vague, sloppy writing has rendered the message unclear. We get the fact that two guys – Fred and Jim – were fighting at a place called the Midnight Bar. We also understand that Sadie was the cause of the altercation. But then everything becomes unclear. We know someone pulled a knife. But who? Fred or Jim? We can also assume that Sadie shot the man who pulled the knife. But again, was it Fred or Jim?

That information might not be important to you. Or it might be extremely important. Let’s say you’re Fred’s wife and you hear this report on the news. Given the fact that Fred said he was working late, you would ask yourself what he was doing at the Midnight Bar in the first place, and then wonder whether the strumpet Sadie shot him or Jim. Because if it was Jim she shot, you’d have to shoot Fred yourself when he comes home.

As you can see, clarity in writing is often extremely important.

Special Note: Send Me Your Problems!

Some of you have asked if I could help you with specific writing issues. My answer is yes. Send me a comment with a piece of text you have written (nothing too long, please) and tell me what has you stumped or doesn’t seem right. I’ll do my best to get to the bottom of it and we’ll invite others to comment with their ideas or suggestions. Let’s make this a valuable, interactive learning experience. To contact me, click here.

Writers tend to be their own worst proofreaders. Why? It’s probably because when they proof their own work, they tend to sink deep into the more organic issues of their texts rather than restricting their attention to spelling, grammar and punctuation.

For example, instead of catching the fact that they shouldn’t have spelled “principal” with a “-ple,” they begin pondering whether they should have used the phrase “tyrannical taskmaster” instead. By the time they decide against that, they have moved on, leaving the offending “principle” to incorrectly describe the balding guy who ran their school.

Proofreading is a squirrelly thing. I wrote a book about angels once and had the devil of a time finding the errors. I proofed the book several times. I asked some other intelligent people to proof it. My publisher and his assistant both proofed it. The distributor also had it proofed.

In the first edition, there were 22 major errors and typos! And it wasn’t a long book.

To prove my point about proofreading being squirrelly, quickly read the following sentence and count the number of f’s you find in it.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

How many f’s did you pick out? Most people find three or maybe four. Yet there are six! People typically don’t “see” the f’s in the three occurrences of the word “of” in the sentence. If you found them, you’re better than most – perhaps a born editor.

These proofreading strategies can safeguard your image and save you some embarrassment:

1. Before you start, minimize distractions. Concentrate!
2. Select your medium: computer screen or paper? Which is best for you?
3. On the first read-through, pay attention to meaning and construction.
4. On the second read-through, restrict your focus to each word, each punctuation mark. Look at each word. Read slowly. (Some proofreaders read texts backwards, word by word.)
5. Check for your most common errors (for example, “your” for “you’re”).
6. In a longer document, use your word processor’s search-and-replace function to find and fix errors that may recur.
7. Option: Read the text aloud slowly. This brings two senses into play.
8. Pay special attention to prominent text, such as headlines, subheadings and captions.
9. If time permits, have someone else proofread what you’ve written. It’s twice as hard to spot mistakes in your own writing as it is in someone else’s work.

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The two words – compliment and complement – may look like twins, but they have completely different meanings. The difference between them is tiny: one has an “i” between the “l” and “m” while the other sports an “e.”

Which of the following blanks would you fill in with “compliment” and which with “complement”?

___________ means to complete.
___________ means to say something nice.

If you put “compliment” with an “i” in the first blank and “complement” with an “e” in the second blank, you’re absolutely … wrong. It should be …

“Complement” means to complete.
“Compliment” means to say something nice.

Here are a some examples:

• Fred gave me a compliment when he said I look younger than my age.
• The flowers were the perfect complement to the candlelight dinner.
• Thank you for the compliment. Yes, we do complement each other quite well.

There’s a terribly easy way to remember which is which. Simply associate the “i” in “compliment” with the “i” in “nice.” Or, you could associate the “e” in “complement” with the two “e’s” in “complete.” You only need to remember one of those rules because if it doesn’t conform to the rule you’ve committed to memory, it has to be the other form of the word by default.

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