Balancing Puzzle Fighter

I designed the balance changes and helped oversee the art for the Capcom’s Puzzle Fighter HD Remix, a remake of the original Puzzle Fighter. My high level goal was to change as little as possible because the original game is very well-designed and fun. It’s the single best competitive puzzle game that I know of. That said, the original game does have a problem: only 2 of the 11 characters are playable in a serious match. I did not want to get into any deep changes with the underlying formulas or rules because—character balance aside—the game is very good already. So, I restricted myself to changing only three variables:

1) drop patterns
2) damage scaling per character
3) the “diamond trick.”

Drop Patterns from the original Puzzle Fighter
		Akuma (deals 70%)
Ryu	Chun Li	Dan	Sakura	Ken
Morrigan	Hsien-Ko	Devilot (deals 70%)	Donovan	Felicia

New, Rebalanced Puzzle Fighter Drop Patterns
		Akuma (deals 100% takes 120%)
Ryu	Chun Li (deals 120%)	Dan	Sakura	Ken
Morrigan	Hsien-Ko	Devilot (deals 85%)	Donovan	Felicia

Drop Patterns

A drop pattern is the pattern of gems you send to the opponent's side after you break gems on your side. Drop patterns help differentiate the characters, but they also serve a useful overall purpose: they allow for defense. Because you know the pattern of colors that the opponent is capable of dropping on your side, it’s possible to build your side so that enemy attacks sometimes help you. If all characters sent random patterns of blocks, it would be very difficult to build up large Power Gems on your side without having them covered up all the time. So we want the drop patterns to be predictable and not too mixed-up.

In the original game, Ken and Donovan were the best because they had the “least bad” drop patterns. Actually, Akuma and Devilot had the best drop patterns, but they also only dealt 70% of normal damage, a handicap that made them the worst characters. Because I knew the game was already fun when playing Ken vs. Donovan (that’s all anyone ever played), I thought it would be good to balance the game around their power-level. For this reason, Ken and Donovan are exactly the same in the rebalanced version.

	► ►
Old Ken		New Ken (Unchanged)
	► ►
Old Donovan		New Donovan (Unchanged)

I also wanted to keep Dan unchanged. He’s a joke character who can only send red gems, so he’s supposed to be the worst. I liked the idea that Akuma and Devilot have the best drop patterns in the game but with a drawback. It’s just that the drawback of dealing only 70% damage was too severe. The new Devilot deals 85% damage (better than 70%!) while the new Akuma’s damage went all the way up to 100% (normal damage). I thought that it would be a more fitting drawback (based on his Street Fighter appearances) if he takes 20% more damage than the other characters.

	► ►
Old Dan		New Dan (Unchanged)
	► ►
Old Akuma (Deals 70%)		New Akuma (Unchanged Pattern Deals 100%, Takes 120%)
	► ►
Old Devilot (Deals 70%)		New Devilot (Unchanged Pattern, Deals 85%)

I didn’t want to tinker with damage scaling numbers for very many characters, so there is only one character besides Akuma and Devilot with a damage adjustment: Chun Li. I thought it would be interesting to make one character that’s the reverse of Akuma: instead of having the best pattern and taking more damage, Chun Li has the worst pattern but deals 20% extra damage. I hope this makes Chun Li a tempting character to play because she has the ability to do so much damage, but her terrible pattern can really backfire against you sometimes.

	► ►
Old Chun Li		New Chun Li (Unchanged Pattern, deals 120%)

So far, that’s 6 of the 11 characters, and I haven’t changed a single drop pattern yet! The remaining 5 characters needed new drop patterns, though. Even though these 5 drop patterns needed updates, I wanted to keep the general feel of each one for nostalgia’s sake. Sakura and Felicia had similar patterns, and both suffered from only being able to drop green in column 1 and yellow in column 6. This is a huge disadvantage for both of them, so I mixed up the greens and yellows in each of their column 1 and 6. I mixed up Felicia’s the most (alternating green and yellow each row) because her red/blue middle pattern (power gems!) is worse than Sakura’s red/blue middle pattern (horizontal rows, which we know from Ken are powerful).

After playtesting a while, I decided that even the improved Felicia was too weak. Sending power gems to the opponent was just too much of a handicap, so I changed the red and blue part to a Tetris configuration with interlocking “L” pieces. There were a few possible ways to arrange the Tetris pieces, and I chose the most powerful one, such that it’s kind of hard to build against it without filling up your own column 4. (And remember kids, don’t ever fill up your column 4 because that’s the only column that can make you lose the game.)

	► ►
Old Sakura		New Sakura
	► ►
Old Felicia		New Felicia

The red Power Gem in the middle of Morrigan’s pattern was very bad for her, so I replaced it with a slightly better set of interlocking “L” pieces. This change makes the bottom two rows of her drop pattern at least close to the power level of Donovan’s bottom two rows, while the upper part of her pattern is certainly better than Donovan’s.

	► ►
Old Morrigan		New Morrigan

Ryu’s pattern was the hardest to decide on. It has a nice flavor in that the all-vertical pattern is simple and opposite of Ken’s all-horizontal pattern. Unfortunately, having an all-vertical pattern is extremely bad in Puzzle Fighter. One good quality Ryu had is that his vertical pattern would not create any Power Gems for you, but it’s very easy to build, say, red in column 2 and let Ryu fill in the red in column 1 for you. Far worse, his inability to drop anything other than yellow in column 4 means that you can place a single yellow crash gem in column 4 (or at the bottom of 3 or 5) and clear out your entire column 4 against Ryu. I stress again that in Puzzle Fighter, column 4 is the only one that matters: when you fill up column 4, you lose.

Although many patterns were tried for Ryu, I ultimately decided to keep his vertical theme, but replace the third row with a jumble of colors. You now at least need one or more green crash gems to clear out your column 4 against him, and the other junk in row 3 somewhat limits the size of the Power Gems his pattern helps you build. When the jumbled row was row 4, Ryu turned out too weak (and identical to his original bad form whenever you sent 18 or fewer gems). When his jumbled row was row 2, he was a bit too strong because his bottom 2 rows were more jumbled than even Akuma and Devilot’s bottom 2 rows. The jumbled 3rd row was about right.

	► ►
Old Ryu		New Ryu

This leaves only Hsien-Ko, whose drop pattern in the original game was even worse than it looked at first glance. Although her diagonal-themed pattern sounded good in theory, it was too easy to chain together very tall blue and green power gems against her in practice. Other than Dan, no other character in the rebalanced mode ended up with any columns that only sent a single color (they were eliminated from Ryu, Sakura, and Felicia). Hsien-Ko’s new pattern explores the trade-off of having solid colors in columns 1 and 6 (known to be very bad from the original Sakrua and Felicia), but with columns 2, 3, 4, and 5 that rival Akuma and Devilot’s powerful patterns. Furthermore, I kept the diagonal theme Hsien-Ko originally had, and I also kept the “build blue on left, green on right” counter-measure against her. Her new pattern at least makes it difficult to chain together your huge blue and green towers, and the middle portion is actually very powerful.

	► ►
Old Hsien-Ko		New Hsien-Ko

The Diamond

That covers all 11 drop patterns, but there is still one last detail: the diamond. You get the diamond exactly once every 25 pieces, and it will destroy every gem on your screen that's the same color as the gem directly below your diamond when it touches down.

In the original game, the diamond was intended to deal only 50% of the damage you’d do by breaking the same pieces without the diamond. However, there was a glitch that allowed you to bypass this and deal 100% of the damage. In order to perform this “diamond trick,” you must first find a place on your playfield where you can rotate your diamond-piece 180 degrees with just one button press (rather than the usual two presses). For example, if you have a lot of blocks in columns 2 and 4, you could put the diamond-piece in the well in column 3, so that it has no room to rotate horizontally. At this point, hold down on the d-pad, then when the piece touches down (with diamond on top), press rotate at the last moment. The diamond will rotate to the bottom position, and it will appear to break blocks as it always does, but it will do enormous damage because this technique avoids the 50% penalty.

The diamond trick is well-known by Puzzle Fighter tournament players and is considered by many to be a part of the game. Puzzle Fighter has a delicate balance where large attacks that almost kill are the most fun because they give the opponent enough ammunition to fire back a large attack of their own. Small attacks, such as the original diamond with its 50% penalty, aren’t as fun because they don’t nudge the game into that state where you are simultaneously almost winning and almost losing. This is why so many people consider the powerful diamond trick more fun than the original weaker diamond.

That said, it’s pretty convoluted to have to explain this technique to new players. I thought it should just become the default behavior of the diamond all the time, for simplicity’s sake. When this change was made, it ended up making the diamond even more powerful than the diamond trick in the original game. By removing the “trick” aspect, it was much easier to use it on exactly the color you wanted all the time, because no setup was needed (you didn’t have to create that narrow well between pieces to set it up).

Another somewhat related factor was the new “fast drop” feature bound to “up” on the d-pad. The arcade, Saturn, and PlayStation versions did not have this feature (it was new to the limited-release Dreamcast version). The ability to fast-drop pieces actually exacerbated the power of the diamond, because it further increased the reward for playing fast. I felt the game was moving too far towards “play fast at all costs, regardless of how many mistakes you make, just so you can get the diamond.” Playing fast is still necessary to win, but all things pointed to a slightly weaker diamond than the always-100%-diamond-trick version. We toned it down to always doing 80% damage (still quite a step up from the original 50%) damage, and I think it turned out well.

Conclusion

The new game’s gameplay remains very similar to the original game’s, but there’s a wider range of reasonable characters to play and a slightly improved mechanism behind the diamond.

Writing Well Part 1: Sensibilities

You should care about good writing. My English teachers cared about good writing, and they did a good job imparting their writing sensibilities to me, but they never taught me why I should care about it. I figured it was like ballet dancing; dancers strive to be the best they can at their craft for its own sake, as well as to impress the judges—that small group who can actually detect the nuances between two different performances.

That’s all wrong. Writing isn’t for English teachers or judges of essay contests—it’s for everyone. It is our most pervasive tool for communicating ideas. You should care about writing not for its own sake, but because you care about ideas. You care about clear thinking and the clear and honest expression of that thinking. Incidentally, you’ll be lied to your whole life by marketers, politicians, and business people who deliberately avoid clear language, but that’s the subject of my second essay. For now, let’s focus on the simple mechanics of writing plainly and clearly.

I’ll start by trying to pass on some of my sensibilities to you by examining this letter from a school principal, an example from Zinsser’s book, On Writing Well:

Dear Parent:

We have established a special phone communication system to provide additional opportunities for parent input. During this year, we will give added emphasis to the goal of communication and utilize a variety of means to accomplish this goal. Your inputs, from the unique position as a parent, will help us to plan and implement an educational plan that meets the needs of your child. An open dialogue, feedback, and sharing of information between parents and teachers will enable us to work with your child in the most effective manner.

Dr. George B. Jones
Principal

What an impersonal, pompous, impenetrable way of saying that Dr. Jones would be delighted if you phoned the school to discuss why little Jimmy did so poorly on his English assignment last week (maybe because he read more letters written by Dr. Jones?). The above letter uses far too many words to convey a simple idea. The reader gets lost and confused and the writer doesn’t seem to know what he’s saying in the first place.

Once again, with my notes in red:

Dear Parent:

We have established (already sounds wooden) a special (is it really special?) phone communication system (glomming three nouns together is a sure sign of vagueness) to provide additional opportunities (“to allow” is shorter) for parent input. During this year, we will give added emphasis (emphasize it if you must, but don’t “give added emphasis”) to the goal of communication and utilize (avoid “utilize” whenever possible) a variety of means (name these “means”) to accomplish this goal (this sentence ended up saying nothing at all). Your inputs (into a computer? the plural form as meant here is "input"), from the unique position as a parent (don’t patronize me), will help us to plan and implement an educational plan (you’re going to plan a plan, ay?) that meets the needs of your child (I’m dying here, speak like a normal person, please). An open dialogue, feedback, and sharing of information between parents and teachers (you said the same thing three times) will enable (buzzword) us to work with your child in the most effective manner (wordy, verbose, and too many words).

Dr. George B. Jones
Principal

For contrast, here is one of my favorite paragraphs ever, from Strunk & White’s Elements of Style:

Omit needless words

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Omit needless words! Vigorous writing is concise! Words to live by. If you intend to write anything, you should own a copy of the Elements of Style and refer to it every so often. It reminds you to say “Charles’s friend” instead of “Charles’ friend” (on page 1, even). It reminds you when to use “which” as opposed to “that.” Most importantly though, it reminds you to write concisely, precisely, and clearly.

All through the Elements of Style, one finds evidences of the author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get the reader up on dry ground, or at least to throw a rope.

–E.B.White

In Why I Write, The excellent writer George Orwell had plenty to say about omitting needless words:

These [bloated phrases] save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, mitigate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render.

Another pervasive writing problem is wandering around a point instead of directly saying it. Don’t say, “Generally speaking, it’s usually a good idea to clean your fireplace once per year.” Instead say, “Clean your fireplace once per year.” Don’t say, “It seems to be the case that our product may have performed more poorly than our competitor’s product under the test conditions.” Say, “Our competitor’s product out-performed ours in tests.” Get to the point, don’t waffle, and mean what you say.

When you know what you want to say and say it, you create vigorous sentences with no fat on them. You strike cleanly like a Samurai beheading his enemy in a single stroke. When you don’t know what you want to say or when you are afraid to really say it, you create serpentine, boring sentences. Don’t pull punches with your writing; say what you have to say honestly.

When you’re looking for words to omit, omit adverbs and adjectives first. “He slammed the door, quickly” is redundant. “She smiled at him invitingly” is ham-fisted. “He stupidly studied material that won’t even be on the test” is one word too many—let the reader draw his own conclusions about the man’s stupidity.

Adjectives aren’t guilty as often as adverbs, but they are close behind. The reader doesn’t learn anything useful about the beautiful sunset, the brown pine-cone, or the cute bunny rabbit. These adjectives are just taking up space, not serving any useful purpose. If it was a radioactive pine-cone or a blue bunny rabbit, those adjectives would pull their weight.

Let nouns and verbs do most of your work and use adverbs and adjectives sparingly. Also make sure to use the active voice rather than the passive voice. “The house was painted by Joe” is awkward and wordy compared to “Joe painted the house.” In the second case, Joe took an action: he painted the house. In the first case, the house was acted on by a force named Joe. “It was believed by the children that Santa came through the chimney” is a maddening way of saying, “The children believed Santa came through the chimney.” With the active voice, a noun takes action. In the passive voice, something is acted upon by some other thing in a vague, boring-sounding way with too many words.

Here is more of George Orwell’s contempt for pretentious language:

In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the ize and de formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

[Dear George Orwell: you wrote a criticism of the passive voice in the passive voice.—Sirlin]

I think of Orwell’s comments every time I’m at the airport and hear that grating recorded voice caution me against accepting any items or luggage from individuals I don’t know. Individuals is not a formal way of saying people; it’s a sad attempt to sound like the voice of authority. “We the people of the United States,” was a sufficient start for the US Constitution, rather than “We the individuals.” Writer Mike Judge pokes fun at this same word in the movie Idiocracy where the words people, suspect, and prisoner are all replaced with the more pretentious particular individual.

“Okay, sir, this is to figure out what your aptitude’s good at and get you a jail job while you’re being a particular individual in jail.”

–A cop in the movie Idiocracy

Orwell had further contempt for the kind of maddening writing that writes itself without any need for human thought. This auto-pilot prose is especially common when people are trying to sound important or formal. It ends up sounding like they are either full of themselves or trying to hide something in the sea of unnecessary words.

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in the fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

At the risk of over-quoting (too late), I feel impelled to include this gem of Orwell’s:

By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

Remember that all this talk about writing clearly and vigorously isn’t so English teachers will be impressed. It’s because you want to express your ideas clearly. If you can’t express your ideas clearly, you might not have clear ideas in the first place. Vague writing leads to vague thinking and usually comes from vague thinking. It is better to be clear and wrong than to cloak your ideas with impenetrable or overly-fancy language.

The first step in improving your writing is to internalize the sensibilities I’ve been talking about. Ask yourself what Strunk and White would say about your fluffy sentences. Ask what Orwell would think of your hackneyed phrases. Ask what Sirlin would think when you pull your punches because you’re afraid someone might be offended, rather than honestly saying what you need to say.

[Dear Sirlin: You overuse the phrase pull your punches. Think of something original
–George Orwell]

I’ll leave you with this short list of guidelines from Orwell. You could certainly do worse than these:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Writing Well Part 2: Clear Thinking, Clear Writing

Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

–Strunk and White, The Elements of Style

I’ve found Strunk and White’s quote above to be exactly right. When I sit down to write about an idea I have clear in my head, I often find that it was not so clear after all. The act of putting it into writing—making it tangible—often reveals facets of the idea I hadn’t thought about. Clear writing only comes when your thinking is clear, and the process of trying to write clearly can clear up your thinking. The process of writing sloppily leaves your thinking muddled.

George Orwell was concerned with the link between sloppy writing and sloppy thinking. In his time, he witnessed political decisions so bad that they could only be explained with vague, deceptive, muddled language. Unfortunately, this poor language fit right in with the sorry state of English in general. It’s remarkable how applicable Orwell’s frustrations are to our own time.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

The physicist Richard Feynman is one of my favorite thinkers, so it is no surprise that the quality of his writing is excellent. He was intellectually curious, a troublemaker, and acutely aware of the link between clear thinking and clear language. I’ll share with you a couple of his anecdotes from his time at Princeton when he visited the philosophy students and the biology students in an effort to see what the world looked like outside of the physics department.

Feynman sat in on a philosophy seminar where the graduate students were discussing a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They talked a great deal about the term “essential object” and Feynman took it as a technical term he didn’t know the definition of. Then the professor leading the seminar asked Feynman if he thought an electron is an essential object. Feynman admitted that he didn’t even read the book (he was just sitting in on this one seminar) but said he’d try to answer anyway if someone could answer for him whether a brick is an essential object.

Feynman’s plan was to then bring up the question of whether the inside of a brick is an essential object. We can’t actually see the inside of a brick; when we break a brick open we create new surfaces, but we believe the inside of the brick is still underneath those surfaces. His point was that an electron isn’t so much a concrete thing like a brick, but more of a concept like the “inside of a brick” that helps us understand the world.

Feynman didn’t get to make his point. One student said, “A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead meant by an essential object.” Another man said, “No, it isn’t the individual brick that is an essential object; it’s the general character that all bricks have in common—their ‘brickness’—that is the essential object.” Yet another man said, “No, it’s not in the bricks themselves. ‘Essential object’ means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks.”

Feynman couldn’t believe that these philosophers had spent so much time talking about this subject without asking whether something as simple as a brick is an essential object, much less an electron. It’s a safe guess that any papers they would have written about this subject would turn out bloated, fluffy, and vague. You can only write vigorously and concisely if you know exactly what you’re talking about.

After the philosophy incident, Feynman took a biology class for the hell of it, promising he would do all the assignments like any other student, even though he was already a renowned professor of physics. The students laughed hysterically at one of his biology presentations when he talked about “blastospheres” instead of “blastomeres” or some other such thing.

His next presentation was about the nerve impulses in cats. The research paper he was reading often mentioned specific muscles and nerves in the cat, but Feynman had no idea where any of these things were located relative to each other. He then went to the biology library and asked for a map of the cat. “A map of the cat, sir?” the librarian asked, horrified. “You mean a zoological chart!”

Feynman started his presentation to the graduate biology students by drawing an outline of the cat on the board and labeling various muscles. The students interrupted him saying, “We know all that!” Feynman replied, “Oh you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” He said they wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

While the philosophy students hadn’t defined their language well enough to have clear ideas, the biology students were so caught up in language and jargon that they had not spent enough time going beneath the surface. Language is a tool, but it is also a barrier between people and ideas. Using vague language is like trying to see those ideas through a dirty lens. But spending all your time polishing the lens (quibbling over jargon rather than the underlying concepts) is no good either. You have to actually look through the lens of language at the ideas underneath.

While we look down on muddy writers because they only convey muddy thoughts, there is another, greater enemy. The most dangerous type of writing comes from clear-thinkers who write vaguely to deliberately deceive you. (Note: only deliberately split an infinitive if you really mean it.)

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

–George Orwell

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

—George Orwell

Orwell used the image of soft snow falling upon the facts to blur them. Coincidentally, Tony Snow was the US Press Secretary during the Bush administration. His job inherently involved deception. Below is a perfect example of inflated language that is intentionally vague and confusing, designed to anesthetize a portion of your brain.

Question: Tony, a couple of minutes ago, you said one of the goals in Iraq is to prevent civil war. Can you take a minute and give us the definition that the President is working with? Because he continues to say it’s not at that state yet; lots of analysts do say it’s at that state. What’s the threshold that the administration is working with?

SNOW: I think the general notion of a civil war is when you have people who use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within [the land].

[...]

SNOW: At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no.

What you do have is a number of different groups—you know, they’ve been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government.

In case you fell asleep somewhere during that quote, make sure you got the part at the end about how rejectionists and terrorists “severally and together pose a threat to the government.” Tony Snow can’t really tell you the truth—that there is a civil war in Iraq—because that’s not politically good for him to say. He’s forced to play the exact kind of word games that Orwell was trying to unmask.

You can write plainly and clearly, if only you honestly try. Even Tony Snow could, if he had any incentive to. Clear writing is not a skill reserved for professional writers, but it is reserved for those who have their thoughts in order in the first place and for those who aren’t trying to hide the truth. As Strunk and White pointed out, if you don’t have your thoughts in order, attempting to write them down is a good way to help you straighten them out. But if your problem is that you need to hide the truth, then you’re certainly not coming to me for writing tips.

If you’d like a reading assignment, I recommend anything by Richard Feynman. As a physicist, he spent most of his time thinking about how the world works, and was always battling against layers of language. Sometimes it was jargon from other fields, sometimes it was trying to communicate with colleagues who spoke Japanese or Spanish, sometimes it was inflated political language trying to hide the truth. But Feynman was ever-vigilant, cutting through these language barriers so he could understand what the underlying idea really was. Once you truly understand something—and only then—you can explain it clearly to others, leaving out all unnecessary words.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.... So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

–Richard Feynman

Here's Feynman explaining that exact quote: