Recently I've found myself reading a lot of poorly written online content. I don't mean that there were typos or that the writer wasn't using big fancy words. After all, there will probably be typos and a noticeable lack of big words in this blog post. What I mean when I say "poorly written" is that the content just doesn't make any sense. I can't tell what they writer is trying to say.
I'm certainly not strong enough of a writer to be too critical of other people's work, but I saw this as another example of people trying to over think things. This is a pretty common topic on this blog so I thought it was worth bringing up. The problem with most unclear writing (particularly online) is not that the writer is unable to communicate well. The problem is that the writer is trying too hard which ends up making things too complex. If something is difficult to write, there's a good chance that it's difficult to read.
If I randomly walked up to 100 people on the street and asked them simple questions like what they want to eat for dinner or what their favorite sports teams are and why, I'm pretty sure every single one of them could effectively answer me (assuming they speak English). If those 100 people wrote blog posts about their dinner plans or their favorite sports teams, I bet some of those people would end up writing incoherent pieces of crap.
If you are able to communicate a thought in a conversation, communicating that same thought in writing should be a piece of cake. Just write the exact words you would say. The problem is that when people can take the time to analyze every single word, they end up messing the whole thing up. If you stare at something for too long, it starts to look different. You can go through and make sure sure that you don't end any sentences with prepositions. You can make sure you break long sentences into multiple smaller ones (or you could do the opposite). You can replace words with more impressive sounding synonyms. In the end, each sentence may look a lot better, but the actually meaning may have been lost. Unless you're writing the next great novel, no one really cares about anything except the actual meaning.
Don't get me wrong, I proof-read these blog posts and make minor tweaks. Bracken and I both spent about two hours working together to come up with the right text for the homepage of LessAnnoyingSoftware.com, and there are only about 100 words on that page. The real purpose of this blog post is just to point out another way in which people tend to sabotage their work. Just because something was easy to do, that doesn't mean the quality will be lower than something that was hard to do.
