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3 Ways to Make Your Writing Clearer

April 9, 2020
Illustration by Jason Schneider

Summary.   

Next time you finish a document with a few minutes to spare, don’t squander your time editing with minor sentence-level revisions — changing a word here, cutting a word there (and then putting it back). You should certainly spell-check and proofread every document before you click submit. But if your message isn’t as clear as it needs to be, changing the word “purchase” to “buy” isn’t going to help. Instead, focus on the big picture with these three strategies: 1) Cut the “since the dawn of time” opening and get right to the point. 2) Turn those descriptive topic sentences into topic sentences that make claims. 3) Make sure people are doing things in your sentences — unless you don’t want them to be doing things. If you get in the habit of using these three strategies, you should find you won’t need to do as much last-minute editing in the future.

Writing is hard, and writing under deadline pressure is even harder. If you’re like many of the writers I work with, you may be squandering precious minutes before your deadline making relatively minor sentence-level edits — changing a word here, cutting a word there (and then putting it back). You should certainly spell-check and proofread every document before you click submit. But if your message isn’t as clear as it needs to be, changing the word “purchase” to “buy” is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic: it won’t save you.

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