Clarity is writing that earns its reader.

1. Write for one person you can picture #

A piece written by you, to a specific audience: a specific set of people, at a specific point in their lives, in a specific set of roles. It might be the engineer who's been writing software for three years and now wonders if they're keeping up well enough with AI. It might be you, back when you thought that you'd never write well enough for others to take your words seriously.

This is not hypothetical: you are, right now, writing. So consider that you are making some decisions. What's the best way to explain this stuff? What words should I use? Where should I start? Does this joke land? All these decisions become softer when you write to everyone. You know that you'll be helping someone at one end of the bell curve who needs clarity while frustrating someone at the other end who knows all that stuff already and is missing something subtler. But writing with deliberate direction helps you, and it helps your reader, see which part you need to land on.

Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

2. Know what they bring, and what they need from you #

Underlying both decisions and clarity is this: the reader has something in their head as they sit down to read. Some of it's correct, some of it's stale and outdated and needs replacing, and some of it's a misconception that you're writing to correct.

Throughout a single piece of writing you'll face two different questions: What context does the reader already have? and, crucially, What context does the reader need? The gap between those two answers defines the piece. That is to say, this is the main point where writers of technical material fail in their first draft: they go straight from the question they want to answer to the answer that they want to give, completely bypassing the reader-side question of what the reader actually knows already.

3. Decide what they take away #

Your piece must center around a single thing. That thing should be stated in a sentence, ideally somewhere close to the beginning. (No, even now, you feel an internal twitch that says "I should start with the bigger picture before getting down to specifics," but just stick with it.) It should be stated in a way that someone could reasonably argue with.

That is to say, the difference is between subject and claim. A subject lets you talk about the subject as fully as you can, but risks slowly drifting away from your topic. A claim invites you to argue; it demands that you persuade.

Every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn't have before. Not two thoughts, or five, just one.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well

4. Say something only you could say #

Doesn't this apply to everyone? A check you can do on each paragraph is: could this paragraph (nearly) word for word appear in someone else's article on the same subject? If something passes this test, then it's filler, even if it's well made.

What tends to survive the test is your stuff: specific observed details, measured numbers, incidents of which you were a party, lived arguments, changed beliefs.

This is the stuff that can't be borrowed. If your piece isn't full of it, then it's sourceless. It's why writing exists at all. A draft that lacks it has a sourcing problem, not a prose problem.

5. Make every sentence pay #

Now, try this: each sentence should leave the reader with more than the prior one. Don't repeat the same point in different words. Don't throat-clear.

Most padding is caused not by not having enough to say, but by choosing to make a piece longer than is needed to make your point. The other source is writing that follows someone else's form expectations, such as writing an introduction that introduces nothing and writing a conclusion that concludes nothing.

So cut both causes of padding and move that beautiful, short piece in front of your reader. A short piece that lands beats a long piece that covers.

6. Be specific enough to be wrong #

Vague writing can't be verified, so it can't be trusted.

Try to be as specific as you can. Take a sentence like "a dependency that made us vulnerable." It has the grammar of a specific and the content of an abstraction, and it tells the reader nothing that "supply chain risk is real" did not already tell them. The obvious course of action is to name the package, to name the month, and to say how you caught it. When a writer fails to do so, they have written the abstraction with more words.

Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.

Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

If you can't think of a verifiable example, then delete it rather than blurring it. If you can't think of a sensible example, then don't invent one, because when you fabricate a detail, you destroy any residual trust.

7. Put someone in the sentence #

Give people agency. Decisions, cultures, and data don't act; people do.

Sentences like "bad things tend to happen in March" have no human actor. Find a more concrete subject. Try: "Most people find March a difficult month for things to go according to plan." Now you can see who is doing the action.

Use the second-person "you" when no specific person fits. It makes you engage the reader directly.

8. Use the plain word, and break the long sentence #

Prefer shorter words and sentences rather than longer ones. Short words and single-idea sentences read more easily than long words and sentences that express more than one idea.

A simple style is the result of thorough thinking. Ornate prose often indicates that the writer still doesn't have a clear picture of what they are trying to say.

Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences.

Scott Adams

9. Cut what does no work, then stop #

When editing, flag every passage that you suspect might be superfluous. Then consider whether the piece still works without it. If it does, remove it.

Over-stripping qualifiers yields inhuman prose. True writing contains a certain amount of hedging to reflect the writer's own uncertainty.

Strip qualifiers that hide a claim. Keep those that honestly represent genuine uncertainty.

10. Say the relation instead of implying it #

Putting two sentences next to each other can create a sense of logical connection between them based only on rhythm. "The benchmark is saturated. The model still fails in production." Is the second sentence the cause of the first, or the consequence? The rhythm implies an answer, and while you are reading it feels like reasoning.

Try to supply the word: because, although, once, where, so that. If you cannot supply it without inventing the relation, then the relation was never there.

Although the benchmark is saturated, the model still fails in production, which means the benchmark has stopped measuring what ships. Adding an explicit connector, such as although, as we did here, turns a mere juxtaposition into a real claim.

11. Take a position, and say where it is weak #

Presenting both sides without taking a position isn't balanced. It feels empty, and readers know you are evading.

State your leaning and say what makes you uneasy. Give the strongest real objection its own paragraph near the end. Answer or concede it. Conceding costs you nothing and gains you respect.

The objection has to be one that someone actually holds. Fabricating a weak opponent is as dishonest as inventing a statistic, and readers detect it quickly.

12. Write the way you would say it #

Read a sentence aloud. If you would not say it to a colleague over lunch, you should not publish it.

This is why contractions, sentence-initial "but," and the first person are appropriate: writing is a transaction between two people, and hiding one of those people discards half the power.

Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well

13. Do not perform #

Avoid fake erudition or humility, or a voice that sounds rough or as if it were studied.

14. Give the first sentence its one job #

Make the reader want to hear the second sentence of the piece.

Effective openings are often a startling fact, a scene-setting description, a number, a provocative claim, or a leading question. A definition of the topic or an explanation of your intent will not work.

15. Make each paragraph earn the next #

Each paragraph should answer the question the previous one raised or raise the question the next one will answer.

Test your progress by covering the page and seeing if you can predict what will follow. If your headings are doing all the work of organizing your ideas, your writing is merely a list of items that might be arranged in a table of contents.

16. Stop where the thought stops #

When the point is made, stop.

Bad endings usually result from the writer's summarizing a litany of traps, pitfalls, and opportunities or from his or her offering the quotable line. A good ending often returns to a concrete item or circumstance from the story, states what will carry over, and stops. You may feel that it is abrupt and unfinished, but that is better than vague optimism.

17. Rewrite by cutting and reordering #

Rewriting always means that you have moved the third paragraph to the top, deleted the proudest section of the first version, and found the true sentence buried inside the one you wrote.

Smoothing is not rewriting. Smoothing turns a rough authentic sentence into a bland one and polishes away the only interesting thing in your draft.

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well

18. Read it aloud #

Reread every time before sending.

Your ear catches what a checklist misses: plodding paragraphs, breathless clauses, repetitive sentence shapes; where reading stumbles, the sentence is wrong.