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Humanities LibreTexts

10.6.9: Understanding Convoluted Sentences

  • Page ID
    196988

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    Media Alternative

    Listen to an audio version of this page (3 min, 27 sec):

    There is less tolerance for academese than there used to be in scholarly communities; however, a lot of landmark texts were written in a time when there wasn’t such a high value placed on clarity and concision. In your studies, then, you will probably have to engage with important texts that violate almost all the advice given here.

    A middle-aged Asian man looks perplexed while reading a book.
    A complex sentence makes the reader work harder; is the complexity necessary?
    Photo by Kampus Production from Pexels under the Pexels License

    Consider the following example from Talcott Parsons, a sociological theorist noted for both his intellectual force and utterly impenetrable writing style. In reading this passage, 1 imagine “ego” and “alter” as two people interacting:

    Communication through a common system of symbols is the precondition of this reciprocity or complementarity of expectations. The alternatives which are open to alter must have some measure of stability in two respects: first, as realistic possibilities for alter, and second, in their meaning to ego. This stability presupposes generalization from the particularity of the given situations of ego and alter, both of which are continually changing and are never concretely identical over any two moments in time. When such generalization occurs, and actions, gestures, or symbols have more or less the same meaning for both ego and alter, we may speak of a common culture existing between them, through which their interaction is mediated.

    Here’s a version after I edited for concision using the three moves described above:

    Reciprocity, or complementary expectations, depends on a common system of symbols. The symbolic alternatives for alter must be stable, in that they are both realistic for alter and meaningful to ego. That is, actions, gestures, or symbols must have a shared and persistent meaning for ego and alter even though ego and alter are in different situations and are constantly changing. When meanings are shared and persistent, we may say that the interaction between alter and ego is mediated by a common culture.

    The revised version is about 30 percent shorter, and it demonstrates how concision makes one’s points come through more clearly. You will almost certainly have to read works of authors who did not prioritize clarity and concision (or even cohesion and coherence), and that’s a drag. But knowing how wordiness interferes with clarity can help you distill essential meanings from challenging texts. In many ways, writing well and reading incisively are two facets of the same cognitive skill set.

    Practice Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

    Take these straightforward passages and make them less clear without changing the meaning. Turn verbs into nouns and make subjects into objects.

    1. “Statisticians prepared to use spatial models need to keep the role of the models in perspective. When scientific interest centers on the large-scale effects, the idea is to use a few extra small-scale parameters so that the large-scale parameters are estimated more efficiently.”2
    2. “Social scientists will be led astray if they accept the lies organizations tell about themselves. If, instead, they look for places where the stories told don’t hold up, for the events and activities those speaking for the organization ignore, cover up, or explain away, they will find a wealth of things to include in the body of material from which they construct their definitions.”3

    References

    1Talcott Parsons and Edward Shills eds., Toward a General Theory of Action. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 105.

    2Noel A.C. Cressie, Statistics for Spatial Data (New York: Wiley, 1991), 435.

    3Howard S. Becker, Tricks of the Trade: How To Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 118.