smart moves for style and clarity

In school you may have envied the friend who was a master of BS and got A’s on papers without cracking the book. Or perhaps you are amazed by the politician who gets away with lofty pronouncements that are all air. 

How do they create such silken obscurity? And how can you acquire this skill?
 

Here are three tactics for professional-grade BS.
 

Tactic #1: Employ jargon and pretentious vocabulary.
 

Big, needlessly abstract words are essential markers of bull.  Always use a fancy word instead of a plain one. For example, write "puissant" instead of "powerful" and "pulchritudinous" instead of "pretty."
 

For extra depth, impose the jargon of one field onto another, such as terms from quantum physics onto literary criticism. This method produces precious phrases like “the transformative quantum gravity of the poem’s space-time.”
 

Repetitive scoops of big words are also important. Avoid writing “excessive allegations”; revise to “excessive, overblown, and immoderate allegations.”   
 

Tactic #2: Ensure that you choose abstract words for grammatical subjects and predicates.
 

To make the most of your abstract word choices, be sure to use them as the doers (subjects) and doings (predicates) whenever possible. This makes it more difficult for the reader to see what is really going on. Consider this exemplary sentence, in which the subject is in bold and underlined and the predicate is in bold:
 

                     The administration’s proposal requests the industry’s voluntary removal

                     from the manufacturing process of any chemicals found to be unsafe

                     based on the results of the completed environmental testing.      
 

What is the main action taking place in this sentence? It’ is requests, which is the predicate. Who or what is doing the requesting? It’s the proposal, which is the grammatical subject. Of course, it’s really the administration that is doing the requesting because proposals can’t talk, but writing the administration’s proposal distances the matter a little, and every little bit of obscurity greases the skids to BS-filled bureaucratese. (And you’ll note that administration is already admirably abstract because it does not name specific individuals.)
 

Tactic #3: Deploy long clumps of words after the subject and predicate so the reader loses track of the nucleus.  
 

As noted in The Engine of Meaning in Sentences, the subject and the predicate — which constitute the sentence nucleus — are the core of every sentence. Wherever there are large clumps of words without subjects and predicates, there are no doers and doings. Without doers and doings, meaning cannot move forward. This is not to say that other words don’t affect meaning, only that the reader deciphers meaning primarily in terms of the words in the nucleus.
 

Consider again the example above, but this time pay attention to the lengthy word strings following the sentence’s subject and predicate, which are again in bold:
 

                      The administration’s proposal requests the industry’s voluntary removal

                      from the manufacturing process of any chemicals found to be unsafe

                      based on the results of the completed environmental testing.     
 

A sentence like this that sags with subordinate strings after the nucleus becomes more readable by converting some strings into clauses with their own subjects and predicates. Here is one possible revision:  
 

                        The administration’s proposal requests that the industry voluntarily

                         remove from its manufacturing process any chemicals that the

                         environmental testing has found to be unsafe.
 

Three subject/predicate pairs provide the reader with more traction to understand the sentence’s meaning — but a real BSer would leave the sentence just as it was.  Ω        

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Related article  To highlight strong modifiers while revising, read Make the Most of Modifiers.