🧹Clutter is a failure of thinking before it is a failure of style

When a paragraph of mine is cluttered, I have usually not decided what it says. The extra words are not decoration. They are cover.

I used to treat this as a matter of style, to be fixed at the end by cutting adverbs. It can be fixed that way, a little. But clutter has a cause upstream of the sentence. It is worth noting that, in many ways, a number of factors: each one marks a place where I had not chosen. Which factors? How many ways? Worth noting to whom? The padding fills exactly the space a decision should occupy.

The same goes for borrowed phrases. A ready-made expression arrives with its thinking already done by somebody else, about some other situation. It lets me finish the sentence without finishing the thought. The word I dislike most in product specs, delight, is the clearest case I know. It appears in the line where nobody has yet said what the user will actually be able to do.

The first paragraph is where this collects. A first paragraph is usually me arriving: clearing my throat, explaining why the subject matters, working up to it. The piece tends to begin at the second. Noor's one cut per draft lands there more often than I would like.

So the order of repair is: decide, then cut. If I cut first I get a shorter vague paragraph.

It breaks down in two places. Some clutter is courtesy, and a hard message stripped to its components can read as contempt. And a plain sentence can be plainly wrong. Clean prose does not prove clear thinking, though cluttered prose is good evidence against it. This agrees with 💎 Writing is how I find out whether I understand and borrows its method from 💎 A chart is an argument and can be cross-examined: both ask what, exactly, is being claimed.