The No. 1 Killer of Good Ideas

This weekend was the birthday of the late Charlie Marler, one of my mentors way back in journalism school.

Doc and me grabbing Tex-Mex in Abilene more than a decade ago.

“Doc,” as he was affectionately known, influenced generations of journalists during his decades as professor and chair of journalism at Abilene Christian University – and, I’ve come to realize, his influence continues years after his death.

When I was teaching writing-credit religion courses for Florida State University, I prepared my students for their big final paper by presenting them with a list of common words and phrases that clutter and weaken an argument. I’ll discuss other items on the list in a future post, but at the top was “dead construction.”

I long assumed this phrase was the common label for the passive, wordy phrases that open so many academic sentences: “There is”, “it is,” etc. Recently, however, it dawned on me that the only people who knew what I meant when I called these things “dead construction” were people who had also taken classes from Doc. It turns out this was his phrase, not some standard linguistic lingo.

But the phrase is apt. Nothing kills the strength of an argument faster than requiring readers to sift through multiple words that mean nothing by themselves before they find the point you’re trying to make. Consider this sentence from a student whose paper I graded earlier this semester: “It would have been likely impossible for a group to commit so much violence without both factors.” This dead construction requires readers to get through eight words before learning the focus of the sentence (“group”). Further, constructions like this typically require other cluttery words – especially “that” – to make the sentence grammatically correct. For example, “There are three things that George bought at the store.”

My rule of thumb is this: If you’ve got great ideas, get your readers to understand them as quickly and clearly as possible. We academics treasure nuance and layers – for good reasons! But just because our arguments can and should be nuanced and layered doesn’t mean our writing has to be cluttered and confusing. In fact, we can communicate nuance more clearly when we do so actively and directly.

How do we fix dead construction? The easiest thing is just to remove it. In the example above, I changed, “It would have been likely impossible for a group to commit so much violence without both factors,” to this: “A group likely could not commit such violence without both factors.” In my fictitious example, “There are three things that George bought at the store,” easily becomes, “George bought three things at the store.” Making the subject of our thoughts the actual subject of the sentence (instead of a pronoun like “there” or “it” that requires readers to figure out its referent) often solves the problem and makes us think of a better, more active verb.

So here’s to Doc during his birthday week. His legacy lives on in hundreds of writers and editors – and their students.