The statement “Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds-the writer is always slightly behind” in William Zinsser’s manuscript Simplicity and Clutter is a great metaphor. I find that when I have to fight the weeds when I am reading I always either get behind, lose focus, or I don’t understand what I’m reading. Zinsser refers to several examples throughout the next few paragraphs. That show how adding laborious phrases to a writing when one simple word meaning the same thing can replace it, muddies up your writing, making it hard to read and understand. One example that stands out is when he compares the phrase that John Dean said during the Watergate hearing testimony “at this point in time” when he could have simply used the word “now”. Zinsser said when Dean made this comment he raised the clutter quotient by 400%, everyone in America was saying it the next day. …show more content…
They feel clutter makes their writings sound more educated and flamboyant. They like to use clutter as double talk, a smoke screen to cover their mistakes, and to add camouflage to what they are really saying. Making it difficult for the normal person to understand. Turning simply words into laborious phrases. George Orwell pointed out in “Politics and English Language,” an essay written in 1946. That was used frequently during the Johnson and Nixon era. Around the 1960’s Orwell’s statement that “clutter isn’t just a nuisance but a deadly tool” came true in America in the