Fifteen Tips To Clear Writing
Fifteen Tips to Clear Writing
Clear writing should not compromise good writing. Clear writing avoids excess baggage, and is presented in a clean, accurate, lively manner. Excellent writing, even when it’s reduced for various reading levels, should still embrace the music and clarity of the English language. These Tips are generally for nonfiction writing projects.
1. Decide on the main purpose of your writing. Is your intent to educate, provide instructions, review/evaluate a subject, investigate, provide a humorous look at life, provoke a response, describe an action or incident, or summarize a specific event?
2. Identify your reading audience as closely as possible. What are their needs and expectations? Ask yourself, what will the reader or readers likely need or want to know the most.
3. Clearly identify your topic and get right to the point.
4. Lengthy writing projects should use headings and sub-headings to guide readers.
5. To make wring concise, organized and easier to process: use lists, bulleted point-form statements, question-answer formats, and appropriate, uncluttered tables.
6. Page design considerations should use line lengths, margins, and line spacing that are appropriate to the text and to reading levels.
7. Use type style and font sizes that are easy to read. Appropriately use text with upper and lower cases. All capital letters in the text can be difficult for some readers.
8. Maintain the focus of your writing. Unsure writers have the tendency to either not say enough or they generalize, chase tangents, and cover too much material in limited space. Fight this impulse, especially in the body of your writing. Continually ask yourself, “What am I writing about?” “Am I staying on topic?”
9. Most writing answers the questions: who, where, what, when, why, and how. Organize material with these questions in mind. Proceed by taking the same steps that people just learning a subject have to follow. Based on the reader or readers’ knowledge level, use common sense to govern how much detail is used. Please see BARRY Communications – How to Plan, Organize, and Research a Writing Project.
10. Whenever possible show your reader don’t tell them. People remember facts better if they can create a visual image, if they can relate to the information, if the information is relevant to their learning, and importantly most readers, especially adults in a learning situation, want to be able to apply information.
11. Try to write in an active voice as opposed to a passive voice, unless the passive voice is deliberately chosen. Active writing immediately focuses on the subject. By its structure, active writing helps to eliminate problems with misplaced modifiers, lack of verb subject agreements, antecedent/pronoun agreements, tense switching etc. Please see BARRY Communications – Active versus Passive Writing.
12. Vary the lengths of your sentences so the rhythm doesn’t become monotonous. If you are trying to reach a reading audience with lower reading skills, avoid sentences that have more than 30 words in them.
13. Watch out for redundancies, overblown expressions, misuse of homonyms, tense switching, and run-on sentences and more. Please see Immediately Improve Your Writing Workbook to help you identify and correct writing mistakes that sabotage clear writing.
14. Avoid clichés and jargon. Besides being unoriginal, they date your writing.
15. Read your work out loud. This is an excellent self-editing technique that quickly identifies lack of punctuation, gaps, and artificial or pompous writing. Reading out loud forces your eye to slow down so you are better able to detect grammatical mistakes and typos. Since most of us learn to read by having someone read to us, good writing should also entertain our internal ears.