write-clearly

Write Clearly

Make the intended meaning easy for the intended reader to grasp. Less is more: precise, concise wording respects the reader's time and attention, and every needless word spends both. Preserve facts, uncertainty, necessary detail, and the author's recognizable voice.

Workflow

1. Identify the reader, purpose, desired response, format, and tone. State only assumptions that could materially change the result.
2. Fix structure before sentences. Lead with the conclusion, request, or action. Keep one topic per paragraph. Use descriptive headings; use lists or tables only when they make real sequences or comparisons easier to scan.
3. Apply Orwell's tests:
   • Replace stale or mixed figures of speech with fresh wording or literal fact. Test each surviving figure by its literal image: if the picture cannot be drawn ("overarching pillars that undergird", "point a toolkit at a problem"), the words were paired by habit or co-occurrence, not meaning. Fluent phrasing over an incoherent image is the strongest marker of machine-generated prose.
   • Prefer the shortest familiar word that is equally exact.
   • Cut every word that adds no meaning, tone, or useful rhythm.
   • Prefer active voice when it makes the actor and responsibility clearer.
   • Replace needless jargon, scientific language, or untranslated foreign terms with an everyday equivalent.
   • Break any rule before producing prose that is false, ugly, or inhumane.
4. Apply complementary checks:
   • Prefer concrete nouns, specific examples, and strong verbs. Turn nominalizations into verbs when that exposes the action.
   • Keep necessary technical terms when they are more precise or familiar to the reader; define them on first use when needed.
   • Keep subjects near verbs, modifiers near referents, and parallel ideas in parallel form.
   • Give each sentence one main thought, but vary sentence and paragraph length enough to avoid a mechanical rhythm.
   • Ration signature rhetorical devices: "not X but Y" contrasts, groupings of three, staccato sentence fragments, self-validating asides ("and that matters"), and pet intensifiers such as honestly, actually, and delve. Each is legitimate rhetoric on its own; clustered, they read as machine-generated boilerplate.
   • Remove euphemism and abstraction that hide what happened or who is responsible.
   • Never gain brevity by changing scope, certainty, causality, intent, or voice.
5. Verify the result. Check that the takeaway appears early, actors and actions are unambiguous, and every word earns its place. Read it aloud. For high-stakes public content, ask representative readers to find and paraphrase the key points.