Kalampedia

There is a particular kind of writer who makes you feel, as you read them, slightly inadequate. The sentences are long and involuted. The vocabulary arrives from unexpected corners of the dictionary. The argument, when you finally locate it, is dressed in so many layers of qualification and subordinate clause that extracting it feels like archaeology. And somewhere in the experience you begin to wonder whether the problem is yours — whether you are simply not quite intelligent enough for this particular text.

This is, more often than not, exactly the effect the writer intended.

Michel de Montaigne noticed it in the sixteenth century and found it mildly contemptible. He was a man of considerable learning — a lawyer, an essayist, a reader of Latin and Greek — and yet his ideal of prose was something closer to the language of the market than the university. There is no reason for philosophers to use words that would sound out of place in a street or market, he wrote. And then, with characteristic directness: Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition.

The writer who reaches for the unusual word, the elaborate construction, the sentence that no one without a postgraduate degree could comfortably navigate — this writer is not demonstrating intelligence. They are demonstrating anxiety. The anxiety of someone who does not yet trust that what they have to say is sufficient, and so builds around it a fortress of difficulty that will at least ensure no one can dismiss it easily.

Montaigne’s own ideal was disarming in its modesty: If only I could limit myself to words used in Les Halles in Paris. The market. The ordinary transaction. The language that a fishmonger and a philosopher could share.

He was, of course, describing something much harder than it sounds.

Writing simply is not the same as writing easily. The plain sentence — the one that says exactly what it means, no more and no less, in language that a careful reader can move through without obstruction — is one of the most demanding things to produce. It requires you to know, with uncommon clarity, what you actually think. Because complexity in writing is very often not a sign of complex thought. It is a sign of thought that has not yet been completed. The writer has not yet arrived at the idea; they have surrounded the approximate location of it with words and called it done.

The simple sentence, by contrast, has nowhere to hide. It stands in full light. Whatever is wrong with the thinking is wrong with the sentence, visibly, for anyone to see.

This is what Montaigne understood, and what makes his observation more than a stylistic preference. He is making a claim about honesty. The writer who reaches for obscurity is, at some level, protecting themselves from the exposure that clarity demands.

He makes a further point that is worth sitting with for a long time. He wonders whether university scholars — the people most publicly committed to the admiration of Socrates — would have actually recognised Socrates, had he appeared before them in his own person. No Plato. No accumulated reverence. Just a man in a dirty cloak, in their own town, speaking in the plain language of ordinary people. And Montaigne quotes, from that plain-speaking Socrates, something devastating in its directness:

“We can appreciate no graces which are not pointed, inflated and magnified by artifice. Such graces as flow on under the name of naivety and simplicity readily go unseen by so coarse an insight as ours… For us, is not naivety close kin to simplemindedness and a quality worthy of reproach?”

We have trained ourselves, in other words, to mistake difficulty for depth. To read smoothly as a kind of insult, as though the writer has not taken the subject seriously enough to make us work. The sentence that yields easily, that opens like a door rather than resisting like a locked box — we have learned to distrust it. This, Montaigne and Socrates together suggest, is a profound confusion about where intelligence actually lives.

Montaigne also names the courage required, and I think this is the part most writing advice quietly skips. But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

The risk is real. Write a sentence that anyone can read and you will encounter people who conclude, from its readability alone, that it cannot contain anything very serious. Write a sentence that no one can read without considerable effort and those same people will assume, from the effort alone, that something profound must be inside it. The incentives are badly arranged. Difficulty is rewarded in ways that clarity is not.

To write simply, then, is to accept this risk. To trust that what you have to say is worth saying, and that it deserves to be heard by anyone willing to pay attention, not merely by the initiated few. It is an act of respect toward the reader — a refusal to make them prove their intelligence before you will share your thinking with them. And it is an act of respect toward the subject — a refusal to dress it up in borrowed finery that obscures more than it reveals.

What does it actually look like, in practice?

It looks like using the word you thought of first, if it is accurate, rather than the word you found while looking for something more impressive. It looks like ending the sentence when you have finished the thought, rather than continuing it in the hope that extension will be mistaken for elaboration. It looks like reading what you have written aloud and noticing where you stumble — because the places where you stumble are almost always the places where the prose has not yet found its natural shape.

It looks, above all, like trust. Trust that a clear thought, plainly expressed, in language that a careful person can move through without effort, is not a lesser thing than a difficult thought obscurely expressed. It is, in fact, a rarer and more demanding achievement.

Socrates made his comparisons from the most ordinary of human activities. Anyone could understand him. And under so common a form, Montaigne observes, we today would never have discerned the nobility and splendour of his astonishing concepts.

The splendour was always there. It was just wearing ordinary clothes.

That is the whole of it, really. The idea does not need to announce itself. It does not need unusual dress or a difficult door. It needs only to be thought through clearly enough, and then said — simply, directly, in words that belong to everyone.

The rest is vanity. And vanity, as Montaigne would tell you without ceremony, is a trifle dull.