Too little
Simplify away the distinction
The line connects the towns. That is all you need to know.
The explanation loses the difference that matters to a person asking about the road.
Exactitude
Keep the distinction that makes your explanation true.
Dispositional fidelity to the particulars and limits of what one observes or represents.
Exactitude takes care that a statement fits what it describes. In a technical explanation, a unit, condition or distinction can change the meaning. You keep that necessary detail and find plain words for it, so clarity makes the account easier to understand without making it false.
Exactitude gives an explanation that remains true when used
The map looks simple: two towns, one dotted line. Your friend puts a toy car on the line and asks whether it shows the road. It shows distance as the crow flies. You add the road with its cheerful series of bends. The crow has an excellent route; the car needs a different explanation.
Finding the balance in Exactitude
Preserve a consequential qualification while keeping an explanation understandable.
A fitting response
Keep the useful qualification
This line is straight-line distance; the road follows these bends.
Plain language retains the distinction needed for the present question.
Pursued too far
Require every qualification
Before I answer, we must settle every convention in map projection.
Technically related details obscure the modest distinction the friend needs.
The question sets the useful scale of detail. Keep enough precision for the explanation to guide its listener faithfully.
What Exactitude makes possible
A listener can act on an explanation more intelligently when they know its scope. Distinguishing a straight-line measure from a route gives them both the simple relationship and the reason it cannot answer every travel question.
Exactitude in ordinary life
A model specification
Say which version or scale your comparison concerns.
A game statistic
Explain whether the number counts attempts, successes or players before drawing a conclusion.
Nearby virtues, different work
Intellectual Honesty
Intellectual Honesty governs your response to evidence; Exactitude keeps the resulting statement precise.
Generosity
Generosity asks whether an explanation is usable; Exactitude protects the distinction that makes its use sound.
Exactitude and its counterfeits
Pedantic interruption
Correcting an irrelevant term while losing the actual question counterfeits Exactitude. Preserve the detail that changes meaning.
False precision
Extra decimal places do not create knowledge the measurement lacks. State the supported level of precision.
How to cultivate Exactitude
Ask what a listener might reasonably infer.
Name the condition under which the claim holds.
Remove jargon while keeping the consequential distinction.
Try it today
Simplify one small explanation. Identify the qualification whose removal would change its truth, and put it back in ordinary words.
Questions worth returning to
- Which omitted detail would change the conclusion?
- Is this level of precision supported or merely impressive?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and concisely; and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time; but it has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about every sentence, and thus I have been led to see errors in reasoning and in my own observations or those of others.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · Written May 1, 1881
Trying to state a thought clearly can expose an error in the thought itself. The map’s straight line becomes more accurate when its meaning is put into words.
Totally to eliminate indefiniteness is impossible; to reduce it in extent and in force requires sincerity and vigor.
John Dewey · How We Think · Meaning: Or Conceptions and Understanding
Precision has limits, but reducing ambiguity remains worthwhile. The sentence supports a useful qualification without requiring an impossible account that leaves nothing unspecified.
Definition means essentially the growth of a meaning out of vagueness into definiteness.
John Dewey · How We Think · The Recitation and the Training of Thought
A definition develops by making meaning more definite. Naming the distinction between straight-line distance and a road gives the friend the meaning needed for this map.
On my return to Caen, for conscience' sake I verified the result at my leisure.
Poincaré verified a result after feeling certain of it. Exactitude gives checking its own place instead of treating the strength of an impression as proof.
It is necessary to put in shape the results of this inspiration, to deduce from them the immediate consequences, to arrange them, to word the demonstrations, but above all is verification necessary.
The work after an insight includes formulation, consequences and verification. A pleasingly simple diagram similarly requires a check that its symbols still say what is intended.
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
Lewis Carroll · Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland · Chapter VII, A Mad Tea-Party
The Hatter’s reversal makes the difference between two similar sentences comically clear. “Straight-line distance” and “road distance” also answer different questions despite sharing a unit.
I saw in the observatory a timepiece with a double second-hand; one of these could be stopped by a touch, and would, in that way, show an observer the instant when he thought a phenomenon, as an occultation for instance, had occurred, and yet permit him to go on with his count of the seconds, and, if necessary, correct his first impression.
Maria Mitchell · Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals · Chapter V
Mitchell describes an instrument that preserves a first observation while allowing its correction. Exactness benefits from showing how a result was obtained and where it can be revised.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.