5 Simple Principles for Creating Clarity in Your Writing - with Professor, AJ Ogilvie.

Clarity in writing comes down to how easily readers can build a “movie” in their heads—images of who did what, and how each sentence logically connects to the next. Professor AJ Ogilvie frames clarity as the depth of understanding a reader gains, likening it to brightness or radiance rather than something inherently difficult. The practical payoff: when writers design sentences around clear actors, actions, and tight logic links, readers stop struggling and start following.

Ogilvie anchors the discussion in five principles for clarity, built around a storytelling model of language. A sentence is a mini story: it has actors and actions, typically expressed through a subject and a verb. A paragraph is the story of one big idea, made from smaller sentence stories. Clear sentences then assemble into clear paragraphs and, ultimately, clear stories for the reader to “play” mentally.

To make the stakes concrete, Ogilvie contrasts clunky, hard-to-visualize phrasing (“A bike was ridden into a curb yesterday…”) with a clearer sequence of four active sentences (“I fell off my bike yesterday… I was wearing a helmet… I walked away unharmed…”). The difference isn’t just style—it determines whether the reader can effortlessly generate mental images. He argues that subject and verb function as the “engines” and “carriers” of clarity: remove them and the sentence loses its ability to generate a coherent mini-story.

The five principles are then laid out as guidance for revision, not rigid rules. First, make subjects and verbs the big actors and actions. Second, put the subject and verb at the beginning of the sentence to front-load meaning. Third, keep the subject and verb close together so readers don’t have to hold complex material in working memory while waiting for the action. Fourth, minimize the number of different subjects/actors; too many forces readers to constantly re-orient. Fifth, create easily found logic links between sentences so meaning fuses across the text rather than feeling choppy or disconnected.

A key method is diagnostic editing: when a sentence “isn’t working,” start by checking principle one (subject/verb), then move through the others. Ogilvie also recommends using the principles to overcome writer’s block—identify the biggest actor or concept you want to say, make it the subject, and then let that subject carry into the next sentence. For complex academic topics, the same approach applies: isolate a handful of core concepts and define key terms so they can serve as stable sentence subjects.

The ProWritingAid team adds how tools can operationalize these ideas. Readability checks flag grade-level difficulty (often aiming around sixth or seventh grade for general clarity), style checks detect issues like passive voice and adverb overuse, and “sticky sentences” reports identify glue-word overload that clogs meaning. Rather than running everything at once, the advice is to use reports during editing, select the checks that match recurring weaknesses, and treat the tool as a second perspective.

The session closes with practical nuance: repetition can be helpful depending on context (oral presentations often benefit; fiction can suffer if word choice repeats too mechanically), and dialogue may require flexibility because characters may speak unclearly for character-driven reasons. Across genres, the throughline remains consistent: clarity is engineered through sentence-level choices that reduce reader effort and strengthen understanding.