On the Uses of Obscurity

Plain language is a virtue. The plain language movement has done real good: it has made legal documents less predatory, government communications less baffling, and a great deal of corporate writing less dishonest. The case for clarity is strong.

It is not, however, the whole case.

There is a version of the clarity argument that tips into orthodoxy. In this version, any sentence that requires re-reading is a failed sentence. Any word with more than two syllables is suspect. Any idea that cannot be expressed in a paragraph is probably not worth expressing.

This is wrong. Not because clarity is bad, but because some ideas are genuinely complex, and the attempt to simplify them beyond a certain point does not make them clearer — it makes them false.

The complexity is not in the writing. It is in the subject. Writing that pretends otherwise is not plain; it is misleading.

There is a distinction worth making between difficulty that earns its keep and difficulty that does not. Difficulty that does not earn its keep is obscurity for its own sake — jargon deployed to signal membership, complexity used to intimidate, abstraction employed to avoid commitment. This is bad writing, and the clarity critics are right to attack it.

Difficulty that earns its keep is different. It is the difficulty of a sentence that holds two ideas in tension simultaneously, where simplifying it would resolve the tension falsely. It is the difficulty of a term of art that carries a precise meaning that no plain-language substitute can replicate. It is the difficulty of an argument that requires the reader to hold several things in mind at once, because the subject genuinely requires it.

This kind of difficulty is not a failure of communication. It is a form of respect — for the subject, and for the reader.

There is also something to be said for writing that requires work from the reader. Not arbitrary work, not unnecessary work, but the work of following an argument to its conclusion. This work is not a burden. It is the mechanism by which understanding is produced.

A piece of writing that does all the work for the reader produces a reader who has been informed. A piece of writing that asks the reader to work produces a reader who has understood. The difference matters, particularly when the thing being communicated is something the reader needs to be able to use.

The studio's writing aims for the second kind. Not difficult for its own sake. But not simplified past the point of truth.