The Glorious Annoyance: Why Your Writing Doesn't Need to Be Smooth
Every piece of writing advice you’ve ever absorbed is probably screaming for you to make things easy. Easy to read, easy to scan, easy to digest. We’re told to sand down the rough edges, to polish every sentence until it gleams, to create a frictionless slide from the headline to the final full stop. The goal, it seems, is to be effortlessly understood. But what if this pursuit of smoothness is sanding the soul right out of our words?
The common refrain is that if a reader has to pause, to re-read a sentence, to wrestle with a thought, you have failed. You’ve lost them. I want to propose that sometimes, this is precisely where you succeed. A moment of confusion, a slight stumble over a deliberately complex sentence, a word chosen not for its simplicity but for its perfect, prickly precision—these are not failures of communication. They are moments of engagement. They are the textual equivalent of a speed bump on a residential street; they force the reader to slow down and pay attention to the neighbourhood they’re passing through.
This isn’t an argument for intentional obscurity or lazy, convoluted prose. It’s an argument for texture. Think of the last thing you truly loved reading. Odds are, it wasn’t a perfectly smooth corporate memo or a blog post engineered for maximum skimmability. It was likely something with a distinct voice, a rhythm that occasionally surprised you, an idea that made you stop and stare out the window for a minute. That pause, that break in the seamless consumption of content, is where real thinking happens.
The Fiction of Frictionless Reading
The cult of ‘smooth’ writing is a byproduct of an attention economy that treats readers as consumers to be placated, not minds to be challenged. It assumes a passive audience with one finger hovering over the back button. But the writers who build devoted, thoughtful audiences aren’t the ones making things easy. They are the ones making things matter. They trust their readers enough to present them with a knot to untangle, a paradox to consider, a sentence so beautifully constructed it demands a second look.
By prioritising clarity above all else, we often sacrifice nuance. We choose the good word over the perfect one because the perfect one might require a dictionary. We break a long, rolling, beautifully balanced sentence into three short, choppy ones for fear of losing someone. We are building a well-paved, straight road through a landscape that deserved a winding path with a few interesting rocks to trip over and a surprising view around a corner.
Embrace the glorious annoyance. Let a sentence be a little complex if complexity serves the thought. Use a rare word if it’s the right word. Trust that your reader is not a customer to be served quickly, but a companion on a walk you are taking together. Sometimes the most rewarding path isn’t the smoothest one. It’s the one that makes you stop, think, and feel the ground beneath your feet.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: