Simplicity rules

Idea one and idea two

Author Theodor Geisel was dealing with some tough constraints. The audience for his next book required an instantly captivating story with a clear narrative arc, but there was a catch: they could only process a limited set of words, ideally fewer than 300, most of which would have to be monosyllabic. This was understandable given his target was students in the first grade, who would be around six years old.

Geisel had written children’s books previously, but this was to be his first in a new publishing imprint aimed at the youngest readers. After wrestling with these limitations for almost a year, Geisel worked out a deceptively sophisticated tale that differed markedly from those of the simple reading primers used to increase literacy in 1950s America. It featured a whimsical cat whose unexpected encounter with two children generated amusingly outlandish antics, all told with unusual irreverence.

The text itself was poetic, emphasizing regular rhythms and clear rhymes that gave the book an easy flow and nearly hypnotic cadence. Published under the pen name of Dr. Seuss,1 The Cat and the Hat became an instant smash in the world of children’s publishing. It has since gone on to sell millions of copies, spawning a media empire and establishing its place as a defining book for multiple generations of children.

The final tally for The Cat in the Hat was a mere 236 unique words.2 Geisel would go on to write and illustrate several bestsellers using similarly economical language that stripped each narrative down to their essence. He managed to tell complete stories with inventive twists using the simplest words, basic rhymes, and playful neologisms to suit the occasion.3

Three years after its publication, Geisel would take this idea to an extreme, accepting a $50 bet with his publisher that he could produce a coherent book using only 50 different words. He further tied his own hands by choosing ones with a single syllable, with a lone exception.4 Without the ability to pad the story with descriptors, no recourse to convenient words to make the rhyme scheme work, and no ability to add shades of nuance with specific words, Geisel was forced to obsess over every element in microscopic detail.

The result was Green Eggs and Ham, which would become a cultural touchstone, spur the consumption of improbably colored breakfast foods, and eclipse his other hits as the top-selling Dr. Seuss title of all time. The book is a tight marvel of repetition that reinforces the thrust of the story while driving it forward, drawing children along with its snappy pacing and rising action.

Idea two and idea one

The repetition that characterizes Dr. Seuss tales is a hallmark of many well-loved children’s stories. Instead of being viewed as tedious or boring, their simplicity helps readers quickly grasp the throughline of the story, promoting engagement and a sense of mastery of the text. From this position of comprehension each subsequent reading reveals new themes and nuance, encouraging regular revisiting.

While the resulting product may be easy to grasp, finding that core idea and conveying it simply is hardly straightforward. Geisel labored for months over the drafts for his stories. The publishing imprint for beginning readers that launched with The Cat in the Hat required such intense oversight that he eventually limited it to four titles a year. That was the only way each could receive the obsessive care his perfectionism demanded. A narrow vocabulary could produce paradoxically rich results, but it required extraordinary levels of editing.

For adults it might seem dull or uncreative to take the same message and deliver it again and again, but this approach can instead ensure that an idea is thoroughly absorbed. Musical composers often play on the same motif, returning to it at various points in their work to re-center the listener. Several movie franchises have iconic scores which are invariably featured with each new edition—producers wouldn’t dream of replacing them with something new, however fresh.5

In several of these franchises, particularly those that reliably generate summer blockbusters, the plots themselves are variations on a single theme, with similar conflicts, peril facing the leads, and climactic resolution.6 Narrative repetition seems to work just as well on adults as it does on children learning to read.

Writing a compelling story using a limited palette of words is much harder than crafting one with unlimited resources, yet more flexibility doesn’t mean greater impact. The consultant that comes to the final presentation armed with a phone book’s worth of slides hoping to leverage the thud factor is usually less persuasive than the one prepared for an in-depth conversation with a single graph, every element of which has been carefully designed. The former isn’t confident about their recommendation and brings everything just in case, while the latter has grasped the core idea and removed the rest.

Revisiting the same message over and over may feel monotonous to those accustomed to a constant barrage of new information. If that message has been finely tuned, with every word or image deliberately chosen and everything extraneous carved away, it can instead be an entry point for deep exploration of a single rich concept.

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References

The 2019 book Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination, by Brian Jay Jones, goes deep into its subject’s life story including the process of producing his iconic works.