Clarity

Clarity

Clarity in dissertation writing

Clarity is not a property of words. It is what remains when somebody has thought hard about a specific reader.

1 · Clarity means clearly understanding your research problem, your research questions, and how they fit with previous scholarship.

Test: Can you explain it to a layperson in under sixty seconds — an elevator pitch?

2 · Clarity means understanding precisely what needs to be done for each chapter of your thesis — not only truly understanding what you are supposed to do, but understanding how to really do it when you are sitting at your screen.

Test: Do clear explanations of what needs to be done turn to mud when you try to follow them yourself? Can you remember what you were taught in the classes given before you started writing well enough to actually do it?

3 · Clarity means a realistic and thorough understanding of your university's requirements and what it takes to fulfil them.

Test: Have you ever read your university's documents on their requirements? Have you ever double-checked your understanding with your Chair? Have you had work returned as not meeting standards or requirements?

4 · Clarity means never guessing. It means knowing.

Test: Are you certain, before starting a task, that you know what you need to accomplish? And afterwards, does the work pass your Chair or committee with only minor comments coming back?

5 · Clarity of purpose eliminates confusion. It brings a large reduction in anxiety and uncertainty, and freedom from a major cause of procrastination and delay.

Test: Do you feel confusion at times about what you are supposed to do? Do specific tasks create uncertainty and anxiety? Do you delay tasks because of that uncertainty, or because they are stressful?

6 · Clarity also means clear, comprehensible, jargon-free and above all scholarly writing. It means not only that your Chair, your committee and your school reviewers can understand what you are doing — but that you can too, when you reread your own earlier chapters, which are foundational to the later ones. It also means less confusion, less editing and less revision. That saves time, money, or both.

Test: Do you have doubts about how scholarly your writing is? Has your Chair or committee suggested it needs to be improved or made more scholarly? Have you reread earlier writing and not been sure what you meant when you wrote it?

7 · Clarity on your part means you can explain, clearly and concisely, what each of the previous six points means to you and to your thesis.

Test: Try explaining the six points above to a friend or a fellow candidate, in relation to your own work.

What clarity actually is

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 grok. A complete holistic grasp.

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. To understand a thing so thoroughly that you are no longer standing outside it looking in. The observer and the observed stop being separate.

That is what clarity is. Not knowing about your study. Grokking it.

And 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.

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.

Clear thinking precedes clear writing

Generations of grumpy old professors have said it: if you cannot write it clearly, you do not understand it clearly.

The order does not reverse. The clear sentence is the output of a settled understanding, not the cause of one.

But there is one important exception, and it is worth understanding properly: outlining.

Why outlining is different

Outlining is not writing. It is thinking, made visible.

Prose forces you to commit. You choose words, build sentences, and settle a paragraph before you have necessarily settled the idea inside it — which is why drafting into confusion tends to entrench it. You now have three pages defending a position you had not finished taking.

Active outlining does the opposite, and active is doing real work in that sentence.

You arrange the material. Then you rearrange it. You move a point earlier because the next one turns out to depend on it. You notice two sections saying the same thing. You find the place where a step in the argument should be and is not.

All of it without writing a single sentence you would have to unpick.

So the relationship genuinely runs both ways. Clear thought produces a good outline — and the act of outlining produces clear thought, because arranging material until it is linear, logical and free of gaps is the work of understanding it.

Then, and only then, the prose follows.

Outlining is an act of confrontation.

Which is why almost nobody does it

An outline shows you what you do not know. The step you cannot state. The connection you have not worked out. The source you do not have, for a claim you have been assuming.

All of it arrives at once, and none of it is comfortable.

Prose does not do that to you. Prose lets you approach a gap and go round it — a transitional sentence here, a qualifier there — and you produce three fluent pages with the gap still underneath them, where you will not trip over it.

And underneath the avoidance sits a belief that almost nobody says out loud:

It will come to me while I am writing.

It will not.

Writing does not fill gaps. It conceals them — from you first, because you know what was supposed to be there and your eye supplies it.

Your Chair does not know what was supposed to be there. Neither does School Review. They see the gap you wrote over, and they call it unclear, or needs more depth, or does not hang together.

The confrontation was always coming.

Have it now, alone, in front of your screen — or have it later, in writing, in front of the people assessing you. The second version costs a term, and the pain is much greater. The full account of what that confrontation actually involves is on our outlining page.

Which is why "your writing is unclear" is so often the wrong diagnosis. The candidate rewrites, simplifies, shortens — and it does not help, because the sentences were the symptom. Vague prose reflects vague thought.

None of this is new. Boileau set it out in 1674, and the famous couplet everybody quotes is the weakest part of the passage:

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 of it, settled in 1674 by a man giving advice to poets.

And the opening image is the best writing in the passage — minds whose dark thoughts are wrapped in a thick cloud that reason cannot pierce. That is vague understanding, described from the outside, three hundred and fifty years ago.

The hazard: it reads fine to you

This is the part that catches everyone, and it is why re-reading your own work does not find it.

Vague understanding does not feel vague. It feels good enough, or defensible, in your own head.

And here is the trap. Vague prose in your chapter reads perfectly well to the person immersed in it who wrote it, because it matches the vague thinking in their head.

That match is the hazard.

Unless your understanding has improved since you wrote the chapter, all appears well. To you. Not to anyone else, and most certainly not to your Chair.

The test: explain it to your fifteen-year-old nephew

If you think your understanding is good enough but it does not seem to reach the page, try explaining it to somebody who cannot fill in the gaps for you.

A bright teenager is the right level. They will not politely nod at a term they do not know, and they will ask the question your Chair is too busy to ask.

This is also why teaching something nearly always improves your own grasp of it. You cannot teach a thing you have not grokked, and finding out where you stall is finding out what you do not yet understand.

Precision is the marker

A clear understanding produces precise expression, 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.

Vagueness in the prose is vagueness in the head, on exhibit.

Stodge

You can spot it by the shape. Many words where a short phrase would do. A qualifier on every claim. Both sides of a contrast given equal weight so neither lands. No sentence the paragraph would collapse without.

And it is fatal in a dissertation, because a dissertation must argue. An argument is a claim somebody could disagree with. Stodge is engineered to leave nothing to disagree with — which is why a chapter can be clean, correct, well organized, and still draw the comment that there is nothing to push against. Your committee will feel it before they can name it.

There is an odd consolation. Detectors measure how probable text is — which is why disciplined, conventional academic prose scores badly, and stodge scores worst of all. Distinctive writing is improbable writing. The sharper and more particular your prose, the less it resembles the most likely next word.

Which means your own idiom is protecting you, and software is trying to remove it.

A worked example. One of us has always written de minimis — so minor as to merit disregard, a threshold below which a thing does not warrant attention. Every grammar checker and every AI model on the planet wants it gone: too formal, too Latinate, use trivial. Twenty years ago that was a stylistic quibble. Now it is a fingerprint. The usages that mark you as a particular person who reads particular things are exactly the ones the software rounds off.

So: keep your own words — but keep them for the right reason.

The test is precision, not unusualness. De minimis survives because it means something exact that trivial does not. Keep a word that does work no ordinary word does. Cut one that is there for flavor.

Because obscurity is not the opposite of stodge. It is stodge in better clothes. Long words standing in for short ones, jargon deployed for authority, a Latin tag used for effect — every one of those puts words where thought should be, which is precisely the fault of hedging, reached from the other direction. A committee reads ornate prose as compensating for something, and they are usually right.

Good academic writing is distinctive because the thinking is distinctive, not because the vocabulary is. Sharp, particular and committed prose does not look machine-made — and that is a consequence of having something to say, not a technique for disguising that you have not.

When something suggests replacing a phrase you chose deliberately with the phrase everybody uses, ask which one is more exact. If it is yours, say no.

The Point Test — it takes two minutes

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.

Apply it to your own chapters. Apply it to anything a machine wrote for you. Full treatment: the Point Test.

The First Paragraph Test

Copy the first paragraph of every chapter into one document, in order, and read them together with nothing else around them.

Uneven voice, uneven register, or a different argument appearing in one chapter's opening means the chapters are not one document — even when each chapter reads fine on its own.

Ten minutes. Run it before you submit anything for review.

The seven tenets at the top of this page are applications of everything since. They are what clarity looks like once you have it — in your topic, in your grasp of what each chapter requires, in your writing. Worth rereading them now that you have the reasoning behind them.

More on all of this — including why generations of professors have said the same thing, and what Boileau worked out in 1674 — is in our blog post Clarity is not a writing skill.

Why does dissertation prose have to be linear?

• Lack of linearity is
  a. Usually related, in part, to lack of clarity and lack of focus.
  b. Often a cause of prolixity (excess, not to point, verbiage).
  c. A sign that outline may not have been used to write text.
  d. Narrative text that is not clear because it does not start at A and go to Z in a direct line.
  e. Note: Every sentence should follow directly from previous sentence.
  f. Note: Every paragraph should express one thought. A paragraph about balls should discuss balls and not apples or boxes. In a longer section, usually paragraphs also lead to one another with one thought being expressed which, in turn, sets the stage for the next thought until the topic is concluded.

Based on hard experience – and much time wasted over the years - we completely and unreservedly believe that gaining complete clarity on a topic is always the precursor to success. Once you have attained real clarity? All that remains is execution. Whatever your doubts - you can do it, but it is a step by step process no matter what step you are on now. Clarity of thought, leads to clear outlining and vice versa, clarity of outlining is the first step in clear, linear writing. However, the idea of clarity, rightly understood informs success in all human endeavors. If you have doubts about getting relentless clarity on your thesis work? Rest assured that we can provide concrete and comprehensible help at every step of the way.

So, what constitutes good writing?

1. Acronyms: Limit use of acronyms. Acronyms should not be used unless the term is used extensively in your thesis … and at minimum three times.

2. Jargon: use of industry or academic jargon makes text harder to read. A study of 21,486 papers found that citations dropped sharply once jargon exceeded 1% of the abstract — and that none of the most highly cited papers used any jargon at all in the title. One per cent of a 250-word abstract is two and a half words; three jargon terms put you over.

Martínez & Mammola (2021), Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 288(1948), 20202581. Avoid jargon!

Not every technical term is jargon. A methodology chapter cannot avoid heteroscedasticity or saturation, and should not try.

The finding is about unnecessary specialization — terms used where a plain word would do, and acronyms coined for a single paper.

3. Clarity is enhanced by use of short words and short sentences. The key virtue is brevity.

4. Avoid 'run-on' sentences – these are sentences that go on, and on, and on. Break them up. Once a sentence gets to three lines of text you need to start to be on the alert.

5. Prolixity. The opposite of brevity. Prolixity is using too many words. Use as few words as possible to convey your meaning. Fewer words = clearer writing.

6. Brevity. Keeping it short! Short sentences…and, yes, short words.

7. Slang – never use slang, or even colloquial usages, in your own academic writing. Keep to plain, standard English.

8. Focus. Lack of focus in writing, in other words, writing that is vague, wandering, and off the main point is a sign of clarity issues.

9. Linearity. Lack of linearity usually walks hand in hand with lack of focus and/or lack of clarity. Linearity means a paragraph or section starts at the beginning of a thought or topic and logically and clearly progresses through linked steps to the end of a thought or topic.

10. Clear writing is easy on your Chair, your committee, on School Review…and, indeed on you as you will often need to reread passages of your work as you work on later sections.

11. Lack of clarity wastes time and may retard progress due to misunderstandings about what you mean on the parts of your Chair or committee.

So why can a machine not just follow these seven tenets?

Ask any competent AI model to make a paragraph clearer and it will do it. Shorter words. Shorter sentences. Jargon removed. One thought per paragraph. Every tenet on this page, applied instantly and without complaint.

And what comes back will very often say nothing at all.

Read a few paragraphs of AI-smoothed text and then ask yourself whether it made a point worth remembering. Not whether it was about something — whether it made a point. One you could repeat tomorrow. One somebody could disagree with.

Frequently there is nothing to repeat. It read perfectly. It left no impression whatsoever.

Here is why, and it matters more than any rule on this page.

Human clarity is subtractive. You cut what does not serve the argument. What is left is precise because you decided what mattered. Every one of these seven tenets is a decision-forcing device — it makes you choose what stays. This is one of the foundational skills in learning to be a scholar — or, for that matter, a top-drawer corporate report writer.

Machine clarity is generative. The model produces the most probable phrasing, and the most probable phrasing is the most conventional one. So precision is exactly what gets rounded off. "Roughly forty percent" becomes "a significant proportion." "This will fail" becomes "this may face challenges." A claim somebody could argue with becomes one nobody would bother to.

Same surface. Opposite process. And the difference only shows when the claim has stakes — which, in a dissertation, is always.

So clarity is not the absence of complication. It is the presence of a decision.

You can satisfy all seven tenets and still say nothing, and a machine will do it faster than you can. What the tenets are actually for is forcing you to work out what you are claiming — and once you know that, the short words and the plain sentences follow on their own.

Full treatment, and a two-minute test you can run on any section of your own work, can be found on our Human-in-the-Loop Structural Refinement page.