One of the least pleasant aspects of a professional person’s job is the need to put things in writing.
专业人士工作中最不愉快的方面之一就是需要把事情写下来。

Almost everyone finds it a chore and wishes he were better at it. And many people are told specifically that they need to improve if they want to progress.
几乎所有人都觉得写作是一件苦差事，并希望自己在这方面做得更好。而且很多人会被明确告知，如果想要取得进步，就需要提高写作能力。

The reason most people don’t improve is that they assume that writing more clearly means writing simpler, more direct sentences.
大多数人之所以没有进步，是因为他们认为写得更清晰就是写得更简单、更直接。

And it is true that the sentences in their documents are often overlong and unwieldy. Moreover, their language is frequently too technical or too abstract, and their paragraphs on occasion are awkwardly developed.
他们的文档中的句子确实常常冗长且笨拙。此外，他们的语言通常过于技术化或过于抽象，段落的组织有时也显得不自然。

But these are weaknesses of style, and it is notoriously difficult for a person who has completed the formal part of his education to change his writing style.
但这些是文体上的缺点，而对于那些已经完成正规教育的人来说，改变写作风格是出了名的难。

Not that it cannot be done; rather, it’s like learning to type. It requires a good many repetitive exercises, for which most on-the-job writers in industry and government simply cannot find the time. As a result, they continue to be told they need to write ‘more clearly.’
并不是说这不可能做到；只是，它就像学习打字一样。需要进行大量重复练习，而大多数行业和政府的在职写作者根本没有时间去做这些练习。因此，他们不断被告知需要“写得更清楚”。

However, there is a second cause of unclear writing, far more pervasive than the first, and much easier to correct.
然而，写作不清晰还有第二个原因，这个原因比第一个更普遍，而且更容易纠正。

This relates to the structure of the document – the order in which the sentences appear regardless of whether they are well or poorly written.
这与文档的结构有关——即句子的出现顺序，无论这些句子写得好还是不好。

If a person’s writing is unclear, it is most likely because the ordering of the ideas conflicts with the capability of the reader’s mind to process them.
如果一个人的写作不清晰，通常是因为思路的排列顺序与读者的思维处理能力相冲突。

This capability is the same for everyone, whether reader or writer, so that learning to accommodate it is a relatively easy task.
这种能力对所有人都相同，无论是读者还是作者，因此学习如何适应它是相对容易的任务。

And invariably, the writer who forces himself to match the structure of his writing to that of his reader’s mind also finds that he has clarified his own thinking sufficiently to write less awkward sentences.
而且，那些努力让自己的写作结构与读者思维结构匹配的作者，往往会发现自己的思路更加清晰，写出的句子也变得不那么别扭。

This first section of the book explains why the structure in a reader’s mind will always be a pyramid, and what the logical substructures are that make up that pyramid.
本书的第一部分解释了为什么读者思维中的结构总是一个金字塔结构，以及构成该金字塔的逻辑子结构是什么。

It tells you how to use this knowledge to identify the ideas you need to include in a particular document, and to structure a clear relationship between them.
它会告诉你如何利用这一知识来确定在特定文档中需要包含的思想，并在它们之间构建清晰的关系。

Finally, it tells you how to highlight your structure so the ideas and their relationships will be easy to see at a glance.
最后，它还会告诉你如何突出你的结构，使得读者可以一目了然地看到思想及其之间的关系。