Redacting Rowan's redundancy

Rowan Williams’ Theological Integrity is almost impenetrable. So Delphic is its discourse that a professor at my university once warned a class of Masters students that they might have to read it five or six times to understand it. Rowan won this battle for incomprehensibility through a ream of means: he introduced concepts that he never defined, he made impossibly subtle allusions, and he gave us neither introduction nor conclusion. But his master stroke was to cram his essay with redundancy. Take this sickly sentence:

The self as liberated from the need to be in control of the transactions in which it is involved does not require the subterfuges of escape from direct conversational speech which constitutes the erosion of integrity already described. (38 words)

This sentence it is so full of needless noise that readers will struggle to tell which words are important. They must work out which one of the words ‘direct conversational speech’ matters, instead of just reading the word ‘conversation’ (a feat few find taxing). And when it taxes readers to work out which words matter, they will understand sentences and paragraphs fuzzily at best. By cutting the clutter, we end up with a much clearer sentence:

The self as liberated from the need to be in control of the transactions in which it is involved does not require the subterfuges of escape from direct conversational speech which constitutes the erodes of integrity already described.

The self as liberated from the need to be in control does not require the escape from conversation which erodes integrity. (21 words)

That might still be ugly, but it’s certainly not the linguistic bog it was before. All we had to do was delete superfluous words.

Let’s do this with a bigger body of writing, his opening paragraph.

What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks "integrity"? Usually we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about. This is not necessarily to make a pronouncement on the integrity or otherwise of this or that speaker, who may or may not know that the discourse serves a purpose other than what it professes. It would be quite in order to say — as a Marxist might — that eighteenth-century aesthetics was an integral part of the ideology of bourgeois cultural dominance, that what determined judgments and strategies was a particular pattern of economic relations, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not "mean" it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam at the head of his compositions. Somebody perpetuating such an aesthetic today, when we know (according to the Marxist) so much about its real determinants, would be dishonest: they could not mean what an eighteenth-century speaker meant because they know what that speaker (on the charitable interpretation) did not — the objective direction, the interest in fact served by the discourse. The discourse is without integrity because it conceals its true agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our innocence, the "innocence" of the original speaker; for we know too that speech cannot be content with concealment. (235 words)

We’ll start with the gratuitous precision. When I read the third sentence (and it took some time), the feeling almost occurred within me upon reaching no less far than the half-way mark that I may not or otherwise will not ever reach the end, but end up getting lost and confused in a whirlpool of clarifications that don’t clarify anything at all. These nuances are so precise that readers will stumble over them without remembering or comprehending them. So let’s cut them.

What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks "integrity"? Usually we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about. This is not necessarily to make a pronouncement on the integrity or otherwise of this or that a speaker, who may or may not know that the discourse serves a purpose other than what it professes. It would be quite in order to say — as A Marxist might say — that eighteenth-century aesthetics was an integral part of the ideology of bourgeois cultural dominance, that what determined its judgments and strategies was a particular pattern of economics relations, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not "mean" it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam at the head of on his compositions. Somebody perpetuating such an this aesthetic today, when we know (according to the Marxist) so much about its real determinants, would be dishonest: they know could not mean what an eighteenth-century speaker meant because they know what that speaker (on the charitable interpretation) did not — the objective direction, about the interest in fact served by the discourse. The discourse is without integrity because it conceals its true agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our innocence, the "innocence" of the original speaker; for we know too that speech cannot be content with concealment. (162 words)

That’s good, but we can do better. The first two sentences are really one sentence split in half.  When we combine them, we get rid of a lot of material. The final two sentences feel bloated too. We can deflate them by giving them a concrete character: us.

What makes us say of any A discourse that it has "integrity"? We can answer this in terms of whether a discourse if it is about what it says it is about. This is not to make a pronouncement on the integrity of A speaker is not necessarily dishonest, who may not if they don't know that the their discourse doesn't serves a the purpose other than what it it professes. A Marxists might say that eighteenth-century aesthetics was part of bourgeois cultural dominance, and that what economics determined its judgments was economics, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not "mean" it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam on his compositions. Somebody perpetuating this aesthetic But today, when we know (according to the Marxist would say, we know) its determinants, would be dishonest because they know about the interest in fact served by the discourse serves. the aesthetic serves an interest, so we cannot perpetuate it honestly. The When we know a discourse is without integrity because it conceals its agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our we cannot say it innocencently, the "innocence" of the original speaker. (109 words)

We can cut redundancy further. We don’t need to know about ‘bourgeois cultural dominance’ to understand the example, and if we really wanted to pare things down, we could get rid of Johnson and Hawksmoor too. In getting rid of them, we can also slightly rejig Bach. And let’s change ‘eighteenth-century’ to ‘18th century’: it’s quicker to read, even if it adds a word.

A discourse has integrity if it is about what it says it is about. A speaker is not necessarily dishonest if they don't know that their discourse doesn't serve the purpose it professes. Marxists might say that economics determined eighteenth-century 18th century aesthetics was part of bourgeois cultural dominance, and that economics determined its judgments, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was lying, or that Bach did not "mean" it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam Bach lied about composing on his compositions ‘ad maiorem Dei gloriam’. But today, the Marxist would say, we know the aesthetic serves an interest, so we cannot perpetuate it honestly. When we know a discourse conceals its agenda, we cannot say it innocently. (85 words)

Finally, information about integrity is scattered throughout the paragraph, so let’s cluster things more carefully:

A discourse has integrity if it is about what it says it is about; it is dishonest if conceals its agenda, professing to be about one thing, but serving another purpose.  

People can honestly employ a dishonest discourse, as long as they don’t know it’s dishonest. Marxists say that 18th century aesthetics was dishonest because it was really about economics; but they allow that if Bach didn't know about that dishonesty, he could have honestly composed ad maiorem Dei gloriam. (80 words)

And there, in 80 clear words, is everything that Rowan said in 235 unhelpful ones.

We could improve things further. We might make the vocabulary more consistent; and we might have people, not discourses, doing things in the first sentence. But the point is clear: reduce redundancy, and you reduce obscurity.