Whole words, whole sight

No matter what it is we’re writing, from a book chapter to a letter to a friend, there’s one mistake we’re more likely to make than any other. And it’s a bad mistake, too – a source of confusion and misunderstanding in our readers, a defilement that if we knew of it would seem as gross as a blotted mosquito or coffee spill on the page. Yet for all this, we no more see the damn thing than we can see a molecule of air! It’s as if a hypnotist had seduced us into adding nonsense words to our prose, which everyone can see but us.

Even more strangely, this mistake can never be gotten rid of, no matter how good a writer we become. Beginners make it constantly, out of sublime ignorance, but even a very good professional writer expects it to crop up fairly often. The difference is that because the experienced writer expects it, her or she has invented strategies to preventively seek it out – to break the hypnotic trance, as it were, see the mistake as others see it, and rewrite accordingly.

So what is the mistake? It comes in two parts. Part 1: Failing to realize that for whatever we have just written, we carry the complete context inside our head, ensuring our complete understanding. Part 2: Failing to realize that our reader doesn’t automatically share this context, and so may not share our understanding either. In place of the glittering clarity we imagine, they may see may be mud or lies or something else we never intended.

To go into detail: As writers, each of us always know what we mean. If we’ve used some obscure technical term, it’s not a problem; we know what that term means to us. If we refer to some idea or person that not everyone has heard of, no problem; we know that idea, that person, so again, we understand. It’s automatic. Or if we jump nimbly from one idea to the next without going into detail, again no problem; to us the connections are so obvious that details would merely get in the way. In fact that is why we omit them.

Yet in fact there may be a problem, or even many problems – blots on your prose as ugly as the mashed mosquito or spilled coffee I mentioned earlier. Unlike you, your reader (whoever you imagine your reader to be) does not have your context in their head. They do, of course, have context of their own, consisting of the knowledge and assumptions they carry around. When this context is shared among many people, we call it culture. For example, if you refer to “President Obama,” odds are that most readers in the U.S. today also know who President Obama is. So far, so clear. On the other hand, if you use an obscure technical term, refer to the history of an unfamiliar idea, or jump from one thought to another, your readers will become confused. They lack the context that supports you; where you confidently lead, believing your words to be a bridge of solid rock, they sink into quicksand or tumble into freefall. Aaahhh!

It’s easy to spot a gap in context in someone else’s work, but much harder to see or acknowledge in our own. The assumptions we carry around in our minds are so much a part of us that usually we don’t notice them. Think of air: we breath it all the time, but we only speak of it if something smells bad or if the wind is blowing. Rarely do we think of it as something physical, with a body – an enormous field of gases surrounding and sustaining us on all sides. That’s what our context is like for us.

How then can we learn to see it? One way is to develop what I call “reader sensitivity”; I’ll post about that another time. In the meantime, here’s a simple 3-step process you can use every time you write:

Naturally there is no “perfect” amount of context to include. Readers are all different: some will know things others don’t. All you can do is try and imagine your particular audience as best you can, and write for that audience.