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If you’re writing to communicate, you need to make sure the reader understands what you’re communicating. This starts with knowing what you want to say – and ends with how you say it. The tips in this post cover the ‘how’ part of making your writing clearer.
Writing clearer to communicate better
If you’re writing for yourself, or your diary, and no one is ever going to need to understand what you’re writing, feel free to ignore this post. Ramble all you want. Invent your own language. Go for your life.
But if communication and understanding are your aims, the following tips will help you.
Tighten
One topic per paragraph
Structure your writing so that each paragraph only contains one topic. There may be three paragraphs on one topic, but not one paragraph with three topics.
As well as making the content easier to follow, this makes it easier to scan through – useful if you’re skimming for something in particular.
One idea per sentence
As an extension of the last point, one idea per sentence keeps the content focused and relevant.
Get to the point
Sometimes it’s okay to take a long time to get to the point, but more often than not it needs to be snappy. There’s a lot of content online (and offline too), and if you take too long getting to the point the reader will likely move on; they’ll try a new keyword or open a new tab.
Make sure to put the important information first. That way, the reader will know right away what they’re getting into. Then you can go into more detail.
Simplify
Limit prepositions
I go into what prepositions are here, but they’re words like: about, between, to, like, near, of, since, within, into, instead of, around, among, as, at, behind, before, through, from, in, off, and despite.
Too many prepositions can be wordy and, if you’re reading aloud, turn a sentence into a tongue-twister. For example, ‘one of the lists of students of the school’ could simply be ‘one of the school student lists’.
Avoid jargon
Jargon is language specific to a profession or group of people. If you’re not careful, jargon can exclude people who aren’t in the know.
Unless you’re writing an architecture research piece about facade vernaculars, superimposed drawings or holistic motifs – or any other industry’s equivalent – you’ll probably want to avoid jargon. Sure, it makes you sound smart, but it can confuse the reader and make them feel dumb. No one ever wants to feel dumb, so the less confusion your reader feels, the better.
Use fewer numbers
I get that documents with graphs exist to show evidence of important information, but the data is so much easier to understand without an onslaught of numbers.
Out of the following two examples – pretending to compare COVID-19 cases in different countries – which is clearer (or easier to interpret)?
- Country A had 1522 cases, while Country B had 3136 cases.
- Country A had half as many cases as Country B.
I would say the second one is clearer. Of course, specificity is a thing, and sometimes numbers are necessary – but try to avoid turning the text into a list.
Engage
Use active voice
I don’t think I’ve written about active voice vs. passive voice on my blog yet. I may need to do that, but in the meantime, Grammarly has a good explanation. For a super basic example: ‘dogs like cats’ is active, and ‘cats are liked by dogs’ is passive.
Active voice makes content more engaging (not to mention it cuts the word count down). The subject is clearer, and the sentence gets to the point. Active voice doesn’t try to be overly polite, and that’s what makes it so engaging.
Active voice is more ‘plainly stating what you mean’, whereas passive is more ‘ambiguous subject avoiding the topic’.
Use your voice
Don’t cut out your own voice (or at least not all of it) to make your writing clearer. Your voice makes your writing unique, and therefore more engaging. Writing clearly is good, but writing clearly with personality is better.