Keep It Simple, Stupid!

In my day job as a ghostwriter, I’ve worked with half a dozen SAS men over the years and I soon discovered one of their favourite acronyms: KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. They use it in relation to planning active-service operations, but it’s good advice for undergraduates too. I’m not suggesting that it will enable you to kill silently in 93 different ways or carry a 50-kilogram Bergen military rucksack up and down Welsh mountains at top speed. (If that’s your aim, you’d better drop out of university and join the SAS instead.) But it will help you produce written work that is clear and concise, with an argument that is readily apparent — earning you high marks and the undying gratitude of your tutors.

Many undergraduates – and indeed, some academics – appear to believe that academic writing should consist of complex, convoluted sentences, littered with polysyllabic words and obscure concepts, and so jargon-laden that even the experts struggle to understand it. Even promotional writing can suffer from the same flaws as academic writing, as in this example (rendered anonymous to spare the writer’s blushes): ‘T*** H***** exercises synergies in a multi-platform social media paradigm that creates a new creative cultural space for blue-sky thinking. He leverages best-in-class solutions to communicate key performance metrics in a distributed yet centralised real-time goal-oriented proprietary methodology.’ Can anybody understand this?

Sometimes I’ll challenge undergraduates to tell me what a particular sentence they’ve written means and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, I thought it sounded impressive.’ It doesn’t. If you don’t understand your own argument, how do you expect anyone else to? The solution is not to sound as if you’ve swallowed a thesaurus, with a dictionary for dessert, but to write in a way that is simple, direct and comprehensible, so that your argument shines through.

Even better, once you’ve acquired the habit of straightforward writing, you’ll find it useful in all sorts of other contexts: writing a CV, a personal statement, a job application or even a love letter. Give it a try — you’ll find that keeping it simple makes sense.