Lucid/Simple Writing

One day, when the clock struck four past midnight and the birds and their chicklings started to wake their surroundings up with incessant chirping and cooing, and I’d sat myself down to write, I realized something that was both very sudden and very critical. I had started writing in a manner that used so many ornate and bumptious words, and unnecessary and unending figures of speech, with a sentence structure as complex as a Rubik’s cube of cosmic dimensionality, that the underlying meaning seemed to lose its essence and impact. See?

I realised that the idea I wanted to convey should always have been more important than the glamour and glitter around it, that the presentation should be more lucid and direct as opposed to my regular convoluted and philosophical, and that sentences shouldn’t be [too long for people to read / unnecessarily long]. This idea humoured me for a while, as I understood that, of course, including humour is also necessary [in pr…. No].

While writing this, however, I also realised that a sentence/portion shouldn’t be so terse that the point gets across but doesn’t hit with the intended momentum. That is why, I also feel that humour is an expression similar to the outer world that is today, during this chaotic confinement in our homes. It is dark at times, at time uncertain, but it will definitely deliver a smile to your lips. While writing in a detailed manner, it is also easy to wander off the main topic. It is, therefore, highly important to have a focus or a streamline and hover around that while writing an essay or article.

Ensuring that a piece of your writing gets explained properly and reaches its intended destination while remaining coherent with the title and the rest of the essay is essential to keep the reader logged on. While doing that, it can also be helpful/useful if contemporary/colloquial/common lingo is used, so that the reader can connect with the piece more easily and get more emotionally invested in it. Giving the readers, options/choices of words and phrases may well be interesting/trial-worthy as it will give them a feeling of empowerment and privilege.

That said, there are other people who incline towards choosing an author who uses poetic and romantic mannerisms in his/her writing, as they feel that it is more eloquent, and reading such books will become a social plus for them. I'd say even I was one of them. I, however, realized that it is only poets and philosophers who write like that, and more often than not, their words either confuse people or awe them. Anyhow, they don’t affect them or their lives as much, because of its inability to filter their way into simple minds and stay there for long. Fluidity of ideas is what is required first, then the consistency and simplicity of presentation and then finally a little bit of decoration here and there. Words that can create knowledge from ideas are much more useful to a society and those that create opinion and bias. Finally, I realised that conveying complex ideas with simple words and phrases can bring about change much faster than exciting and fancy ones messing up even the simplest of ideas.