Clarity is not a writing skill

ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ "The unexamined life is not worth living." — Socrates, at his trial in Athens, 399 BC (Plato, Apology 38a)

Je pense, donc je suis "I think, therefore I am." — Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 1637 (later, more famously, in Latin: cogito, ergo sum)

Avant donc que d'écrire apprenez à penser "Before writing, therefore, learn to think." — Boileau, L'Art poétique, 1674

Alles was überhaupt gedacht werden kann, kann klar gedacht werden. Alles was sich aussprechen lässt, lässt sich klar aussprechen. "Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly." — Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.116, 1921

"Obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence." — Robert A. Heinlein has Jubal Harshaw state this, in 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land

Five men, across twenty-four centuries, who agreed about very little.

Socrates was talking about how to live. Descartes was looking for one thing he could not doubt. Boileau was giving advice to poets. Wittgenstein was trying to work out the limits of language. Heinlein was writing about politics and the human condition in the guise of science fiction.

And all five were saying the same thing, which is this: thinking clearly comes first, and everything else follows from it.

Not writing. Not method. Not technique. Thinking.

What clarity actually is

Clarity is not a property of sentences. It is a state of understanding.

You have clarity about something when you have grasped it completely — all of it, how the parts relate, what follows from what, where the edges are. Not an approximate hold. A whole one.

English does not really have a word for this, which may be why it is so rarely discussed.

The closest is one Robert A. Heinlein invented: to grok something. In Stranger in a Strange Land it means to understand a thing so thoroughly that you are no longer standing outside it looking in. The observer and the observed stop being separate.

And it comes from the same novel as the line at the top of this page. Jubal Harshaw — a lawyer, physician and writer who has no patience for anything unprovable — is the character who says that obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

One book. One word for understanding a thing completely, and one line about what it looks like when somebody has not. Heinlein was describing the two ends of the same thing.

And it is what clarity is. Not knowing about a subject. Grokking it.

The opposite is not confusion. Confusion at least announces itself. The opposite is vague understanding — the sense that you basically get it, which is what most of us have about most things most of the time.

And usually that is fine. You do not need a complete grasp of how an engine works to drive a car.

Doctoral work is one of the few situations where it is not fine.

Why it comes before everything

You cannot act well on a vague grasp. Not in your life, not in research, not in writing.

Every decision you make from an approximate understanding inherits the approximation. And it compounds — because the next decision is built on the first one, and the one after that on both...with any real approximation of provable reality receding into the distance.

This is why Boileau has survived three hundred and fifty years. He was not offering a writing tip. He was pointing out an order of operations, and it does not reverse.

The famous couplet is the last two lines. The whole passage is better:

Read the middle of it again. According as our idea is more or less obscure, the expression follows it.

The expression follows the idea. Not the other way round. That is the whole argument of this post, and it was settled in 1674 by a man giving advice to poets.

What this means for a dissertation

A doctorate is, more than anything else, a test of whether you have understood your own work.

Nobody describes it that way. The requirements are described in terms of chapters, word counts, methods, and formatting. But look at what actually happens at each stage.

Your proposal is approved when a committee can see that you understand what you are proposing and why. Your methodology survives questioning when you can say why this approach and not the obvious alternative — which requires having grasped both. A chapter comes back when a reader cannot tell what it is claiming, which happens when the writer could not either.

And the question that ends defences is always some version of walk me through how you arrived at this. That is not a question about writing. It is a direct test of whether you understand your own study.

Get clarity and everything after it is execution. That is not a slogan. It is a description of how the process works.

Why "your writing is unclear" is usually the wrong diagnosis

Here is the practical consequence, and it is the reason this matters.

When a supervisor writes this is unclear, the candidate almost always responds by working on the sentences. Rewriting, simplifying, shortening. And it usually does not help, which is confusing and demoralising for everybody.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter famously declaims in The Rocky Horror Picture Show: “...So I'll remove the cause, but not the symptom.”

Three points here about our good Dr. Frank-N-Furter. First he is fictional, second, he already has a doctorate so he can afford to remove causes and leave only symptoms. Third you are not Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

...that means you can not remove causes – or worse never put them in, in the first place. Every symptom in your dissertation – unlike the Good Doctor's castle – needs a cause. No exceptions.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter who has a very good grasp of causes and effect would note that your sentences are the symptom. Not the cause of the lack of clarity in your writing. A sentence is hard to follow when the writer, him/her/it-self is not clear on what is being claimed. — so the sentence may not really claim anything or even more difficult for the reader it may try to expound multiple possibilities at once, and the reader feels the strain in the brain.

You cannot write your way out of that. You are not Dr. Frank – you must have causes for what you write. Thus you must find your way forward to a clearer understanding of the cause, and then you can write your way toward it — drafting is a genuine thinking tool, and a good one. Outlining is a better one. However you arrive at it, the clear sentence is the output of a settled understanding, not the cause of one.

Which is why the fix is not a better vocabulary. It is deciding what you are actually claiming, and then saying that. In Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s terms? Are you shivering from the rain or from ‘antici-pation.’

The counterexample, and it is a large one

Wittgenstein's claim is a strong one. Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. If that is true, then obscurity is never necessary — it is always a choice, or a failure.

The obvious objection is Hegel.

Hegel is among the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth century, and he is famously, monumentally obscure. Not difficult in the way that quantum mechanics is difficult, where the subject matter resists ordinary language. Obscure in the prose itself.

The detail that makes the point is this: German philosophy students not infrequently read Hegel in English translation, hoping the translator will have worked out what the original meant.

Sit with that. Native speakers, reading a translation of their own language, in order to understand it.

Now, one can defend Hegel. Some argue the difficulty is inherent to what he was attempting, and that the density is the price of the thought. That is a real argument and it deserves a hearing.

But Heinlein's line is the reply, and note how carefully he put it: obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

That one word carries the whole argument. Not always — Heinlein leaves room for the genuinely difficult. But usually. And where a writer is obscure, the burden sits with them to show which case this is.

And note who is on which side of that sentence. The man who gave us a word for grokking a thing entirely is the same man who wrote that line about failing to. He had thought about both ends of it.

And here is what matters for anybody writing a dissertation.

You are not Hegel, and your committee will not extend you the benefit of the doubt. Where obscurity in a canonical philosopher gets called profound, obscurity in a candidate gets called unclear — and it gets sent back. By the way, the author of this very blog studied Hegel at a Global Top 25 University – the full A in the course never compensated for the time spent and our founder’s conclusion? Hegel really, at the end of the day? Had nothing germane to say. Simple test. Does Hegel make any difference to anyone’s actual life or thinking? The answer is, essentially, no. Possibly the tiniest handful...possibly. Do Wittgenstein, or Heinlein, or Socrates make a difference to many people’s thinking? Yes. Clarity strikes again!

And clarity is not simplicity

Two things get confused with clarity constantly, and both are wrong.

Clarity is not simplicity. A complex argument can be perfectly clear. Simplifying a complex idea usually makes it less clear, because the reader now has an incomplete picture stated with confidence.

Clarity is not brevity. Short and empty is not clear. Length is not the variable at all.

What clarity actually produces is precision — because precision requires knowing exactly what you mean. Roughly forty percent rather than a significant proportion. This will fail rather than this may face challenges. The exact word rather than the comfortable one.

Generations of grumpy old professors have stated that if you can not write it clearly? You do not understand it clearly. Clear thinking precedes clear writing. Conversely, vague prose reflects vague thought.

Which is also how you can spot machine writing

This is worth understanding, because it has become urgent in the last two years.

A language model produces the most probable phrasing. The most probable phrasing is the most conventional one. So precision is exactly what gets rounded off — the specific number becomes a vague quantity, the disputable claim becomes an undisputable one, and the whole thing reads beautifully and says nothing in particular.

It looks like clarity. It is the opposite of clarity, because there is no understanding behind it at all. Nothing was grasped and nothing was decided. The surface is clean because the machine had nothing to be unclear about.

You can test this in thirty seconds on any text, including your own. Read a section, close it, and ask what point it made. Not what it was about — what it claimed. Something you could repeat tomorrow. Something somebody could disagree with.

If nothing comes back, the thinking is not finished, and no amount of rewriting will fix it. And no. A high level AI model will not cite Dr. Frank-N-Furter in an academic blog.

The uncomfortable part

Vague understanding may feel vague but ‘good enough’ or ‘defensible’ in your own head. If you think your understanding is good enough but it does not seem to translate to the page? Simple test. Try explaining it to someone like your 15 year old nephew and see how you do. That is also why teaching someone else nearly always leads to a better comprehension of a topic one’s self.

However a vague understanding comes to be? It is dangerous to your academic health as vague understanding will not create a precise explanation on the page. There is another hazard, and it is why you cannot find it by re-reading your own work more carefully. Vague explanations or prose in a chapter read just fine to the author of that prose as it matches the vague thinking in their head. That match is the hazard. Unless your understanding of the material has improved since when you wrote the chapter all appears well – to you. Not to anyone else and most certainly not to your Chair.

The only reliable way to find the fuzzy and imprecise thinking and any outright gaps in your logic is to put the work in front of somebody who cannot fill them in for you. Explain it to a person outside your field. Give a section to a colleague and ask what it argues — without telling them first, because the moment you explain it, you have destroyed the test.

Socrates knew this. The unexamined life is not worth living, and the examining is the point. He did not say the unlived life or the unwritten life. He said the unexamined one. However, there is one critical point about Socrates' statement that eludes casual modern readers. He expected those who read it to be competent to think – to be competent to examine their lives with the appropriate intellectual tools. Unfortunately for him, teaching such tools, resulted in his sentence of death. We are 99% certain your Chair will not kill you for thinking well. We are not at all certain your Chair will not kill you for thinking poorly! (that was a joke!)

Why this is our one word

We put a single word on everything we do, and this is it.

Not because clear writing is our service — although it is part of it. Because clarity of understanding is what makes every other part of doctoral work possible, and because its absence is what stops people. Not ability. Not intelligence. Not effort.

Twenty-four centuries of people who agreed about almost nothing agreed about that.

We think they were right. Now? Are you clear on that?