Clarity is one of the most praised qualities in prose, and one of the least examined. We invoke it constantly, and yet what we mean by clarity in writing shifts depending on who is doing the invoking and what problem they are trying to solve. A writing teacher means one thing by it. An editor means another. A reader who puts down a book at page twelve because they cannot follow the argument means something else again. The word travels so freely, accumulates so many assumptions, that we rarely stop to ask whether we are all talking about the same thing. We are not, and the confusion is worth unpacking.
Continue reading “What We Talk About When We Talk About Clarity”Category: On Language
How language works, shifts, and sometimes fails. Essays on meaning, clarity, and the quiet ways expression changes over time.
The Word “Authentic” and What It Cannot Do
There is a word that surrounds us now like weather, and the word authentic is it. You encounter it in skincare copy, in restaurant taglines, in LinkedIn bios, in self-help chapter titles, in the language of brand consultants and life coaches and people who would like you to know that what you are about to receive from them is the real thing. It arrives as reassurance. What it quietly signals, in almost every context, is that you should not yet be reassured.
What the Word Once Did
Words do not begin overused. They begin precise.
Continue reading “The Word “Authentic” and What It Cannot Do”The Language of Productivity
There is a productivity vocabulary that has spread, in the last two decades, from the corporate meeting room into everyday speech. It arrives in emails between friends, in conversations about creative work, in the language people use to describe their own lives to themselves. Optimise. Leverage. Bandwidth. Deliverable. Actionable. Scalable. Move the needle.
This productivity vocabulary is not new — versions of it have existed as long as management culture has. But it has expanded significantly, and its expansion into domains where it was not previously present — personal life, creative practice, relationships, rest — is worth examining. Language shapes thought. When the vocabulary of productivity becomes the default vocabulary for describing human activity, something changes in how that activity is understood.
Continue reading “The Language of Productivity”What We Mean When We Say Something Is “Well-Written”
“Well-written” is one of the most reliable compliments a piece of writing can receive. It appears in reviews, in feedback, in the recommendations readers pass along to each other. This is well-written. The phrase carries genuine praise — the person using it means something positive, something admiring. They are not being vague on purpose.
And yet “well-written” is, as a description, almost entirely empty. It tells us that the reader responded positively to the writing. It tells us nothing about what the writing actually did.
Continue reading “What We Mean When We Say Something Is “Well-Written””The Language of Nostalgia Online
Nostalgia online has developed its own language, and like the language of vulnerability and the language of care, it is worth examining separately from the feeling it claims to represent. The language of nostalgia online is one of the most widely used registers in personal writing, social media, and content marketing — simpler times, back when things were different, remember when, they don’t make things like they used to — and it has become sufficiently standardised that it now functions less as an expression of genuine feeling and more as a content genre with its own conventions and its own reliable emotional effects.
This does not mean that nostalgia is not real or that the feeling it produces is not genuine. It means that a vocabulary and set of conventions have developed for packaging and distributing nostalgia online, and that this packaging changes what the feeling is and does.
Continue reading “The Language of Nostalgia Online”The Language of Certainty
Certainty in language performs authority. The writer who states things without qualification, who asserts rather than suggests, who closes off alternative readings rather than leaving them open — this writer sounds confident, and confidence, in online writing, is often received as a signal of expertise. The language of certainty is one of the most widely used registers in professional and personal online writing, and it is worth examining what it is actually doing.
The examination matters because the language of certainty can be accurate — it can reflect genuine knowledge that justifies the assertive register — or it can be a performance of knowledge in the absence of it. The two look identical from the outside. And the reader who has learned to respond to certainty as a signal of authority may be responding to the performance rather than the substance.
Continue reading “The Language of Certainty”How Lists Work
Lists in writing are one of the most widely used and least examined forms. The bulleted list, the numbered list, the series of items separated by commas — these are so common in online writing that they have become the default structure for a large proportion of content. And yet the list is not a neutral format. It does specific things to information and to the reader’s relationship to that information, and understanding what it does — and what it cannot do — is more useful than either embracing it as efficient or rejecting it as lazy.
The list is a grammatical and rhetorical form with its own logic, its own appropriate uses, and its own characteristic failures. Using it deliberately requires understanding that logic rather than reaching for it because it is what writing on screens seems to require.
Continue reading “How Lists Work”The Language of Simplicity
The language of simplicity is widely advocated and rarely examined. The advice to write simply — to use short words, short sentences, plain vocabulary — is given so consistently across writing guides, style manuals, and editorial feedback that it has come to function as a baseline requirement rather than a considered choice. Be clear. Be direct. Avoid complexity. This advice is not wrong, but it is incomplete, because it treats simplicity as though it were a default — as though plain language were the natural state of writing and complexity were something added on top of it.
The reality is more interesting. Simplicity in language is a choice, made against available alternatives, with its own costs and limitations. Understanding what the language of simplicity actually does — what it makes possible, what it forecloses, and when it is genuinely the right choice — is more useful than treating it as an unconditional virtue.
Continue reading “The Language of Simplicity”What Is Tone In Writing?
Tone in writing is one of the most frequently invoked and least precisely defined concepts in discussions of craft. Writers are told to find their tone, to be consistent in their tone, to adapt their tone to their audience. Editors flag tone problems. Writing guides devote chapters to it. And yet the concept is almost never defined with any precision — it is used as though its meaning were obvious, which tends to mean that different people are using it to mean different things.
Continue reading “What Is Tone In Writing?”The Language of Community Online
“Community” is one of the most reassuring words available online, and one of the least examined. A brand has a community. A newsletter has a community. A comment section, technically, has a community. The word gets attached to almost any collection of people who share a platform, and once attached, it does real rhetorical work: it converts an audience into something warmer, an aggregation into something that sounds chosen. The language of community online rarely describes an actual community. It describes the feeling of one, offered in place of the structure.
This isn’t necessarily dishonest. Plenty of people who use the word believe it, and plenty of online groups do function, at least partly, as communities — with obligation, memory, and mutual recognition between members. But the word is doing more work than the situations usually justify, and the gap between the word and the structure is where the flattening happens.
What Language of Community Online Actually Promises
A community, in the older and more demanding sense of the word, implies durable relation: people who know each other, who owe each other something, who would be missed if they left. It implies friction, too — disagreement that has to be worked through because the relationship continues regardless. None of this is guaranteed by shared attention to the same feed. A thousand people following the same account are an audience, closer to what theorists have called an imagined community than an actual one — a group that feels connected without anyone in it knowing most of the others. They become a community only through some further structure — repeated interaction, shared obligation, a reason to stay in relation to each other rather than just to the source of content. Most groups called communities online have the audience and skip the structure, then borrow the word anyway because it sounds better than “audience,” which is accurate but unflattering.
The related word “tribe” does similar work from a different angle. Where “community” implies belonging through relation, “tribe” implies belonging through identity — you’re in it because of who you already are, not because of anything ongoing between members. It’s used to describe an audience that shares a taste or a politics, and it borrows the intensity of actual tribal belonging — inherited, high-stakes, non-optional — to describe something closer to a shared preference. The borrowing flatters the audience. It also flattens what belonging actually costs in the situations the word was built to describe.
What Gets Flattened When the Words are Used Loosely
What gets lost first is disagreement. A real community absorbs conflict because the relationship has to continue regardless of who’s currently annoyed with whom. An online “community,” built mostly on shared taste or shared grievance, usually can’t absorb it the same way — disagreement reads as a violation of the premise, since the premise was never relation but resemblance. This is part of why online groups described as communities are often intolerant of internal dissent in a way real communities, full of people who can’t simply leave each other, generally aren’t. The dissenting member doesn’t get worked through. They get filtered out, because filtering is cheap and repair is not, and the group was never built to do the harder thing.
What also gets lost is the asymmetry the word obscures. A “community” built around a creator or a brand usually has a centre with disproportionate power and a periphery without much — closer to an audience with a stage than a group of equals, a dynamic that runs alongside what the vocabulary of productivity does to the same relationship. Calling it a community suggests horizontal relation among members, when the actual structure is vertical, radiating out from whoever built the platform. The word doesn’t just misdescribe the situation. It makes the vertical structure harder to see, which is often useful to whoever benefits from it staying unseen.
This is where the language of community online does its most consequential work, because the vagueness isn’t neutral. A platform that calls its users a community can ask things of them — moderation labour, unpaid promotion, loyalty during a controversy — that would sound like an obvious imposition if asked of an audience. Communities are supposed to contribute. Audiences are supposed to be served. The word shifts which of those two relationships the group believes it’s in, and the shift usually benefits whoever is doing the asking rather than whoever is doing the giving.
What the Alternative Looks Like
The alternative isn’t abandoning the word — some online groups have earned it, through years of actual mutual obligation that outlasts any single post or campaign. The alternative is using more precise words for the groups that haven’t: audience, readership, following, list. These aren’t insults. They’re accurate, and accuracy costs something the vaguer word doesn’t — it admits the relationship is one-directional, or new, or built on taste rather than obligation. A writer describing their own readers as an audience rather than a community is making a claim that’s smaller and more honest, and the honesty is worth more than the warmth it gives up.
The test is simple enough to apply before the word gets used: would the group still hold together if the shared object of attention disappeared tomorrow? A community, in the sense the word is built to carry, mostly would. Most things called communities online would not, because there was never anything holding them together except the thing they were both looking at.