[This essay is pretty long, and is different from my usual content. Feel free to skip it, skim it, or come back to it when it's more relevant to you.]
Here are my favorite writing tips. I don't claim to be a great writer. But I can offer one benefit you won't always find when great writers share their advice: I've read lots of writing advice. In sharing what's worked for me, I'll bring together the best bits from a number of books and articles.
In an effort to keep this from getting too long, I'll share just a few ideas that I've found most memorable. If you want more, the Appendix at the bottom includes a few resources I especially liked.
Who this article is for
As my normal readers know, my writing is non-fiction. If your goal is to write articles that your readers both (a) enjoy reading, and (b) learn from, then this is the article for you. I can't teach you to write fiction or write passages that readers enjoy for the poetry of the words themselves.
This article focuses on the writing itself—writing passages that are clear and useful. Phrasing and clarity. I won't discuss the process of writing—building a writing habit, overcoming writer's block, sharing and connecting with your audience, etc. For some people, myself included, those are real "writing" challenges—but they're not today's focus.
Here are the four biggest ideas that influence how I write and edit.
#1 Find ways to put new eyes on your writing
Feedback is critical to improve your draft. As authors, when we write every word in a passage, we trick ourselves into thinking that the words on the page flow smoothly. But it's frequently a mirage—the words flow smoothly for us because we know exactly what's coming. That doesn't mean they'll flow smoothly for a reader who's reading for the first time. To write better, we have to try to get out of our own minds, and put ourselves in the mind of that reader who's seeing our words for the first time.
There are ways, big and small, that we can challenge our familiarity with the words we see on the screen, and look at what we've written with (relatively) new eyes. Here are a few suggestions—find the ones that work for you:
Put your manuscript away for 6 weeks before you begin editing (Stephen King, On Writing)
(Or take a one-week break, or a one hour break)
Read what you've written out loud
Or have text-to-speech software read it to you (Tyler Hayes in Wired magazine)
Print out your writing and read it on a physical page (A very common suggestion)
Re-write what you've written, starting with a blank document. (From Julian's writing guide).
Put each sentence on a line by itself, so you're forced to consider it on its own merits (From Several Short Sentences About Writing)
Although re-writing from scratch may sound extreme, I do it sometimes myself. If I feel that an article hasn't quite come together, I may leave it in my drafts folder and work on other things. When I come back to it later, it often feels better to start over from scratch than to try to fix what I've written. My first draft of Sports science findings you should know was sitting around for six months (never mind six weeks) before I opened it back up and started over from scratch.
Alex Hutchinson's book Endure is one of my favorite books, and the entire book is (sort of) an example of re-writing from scratch. Endure was published in 2018, but back in 2011 he published another book, Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? The earlier book covers some of the same exercise science as Endure, but the Endure works much better overall. I love this idea of continuing to plug away at the same ideas, starting over anew as your skills grow. It reminds me of a craftsman—like a woodworker using what they learned building their first chair to make the next iteration even better.
I don't like wasting paper, and I generally don't think my blog posts are worth waiting six weeks just to make them slightly better. So I don't go to those extremes that Stephen King suggests—but I've found a few micro-adjustments that give me a fresh perspective when I move from writing to editing:
I take a quick break. At minimum, I stand up and walk a little lap around the room.
I move to a different spot to edit
I put different music on
I change the font and the font size
These tiny changes make everything feel a little fresher, and help me actually read my words and not just glaze over them due to how familiar they are to me.
Of course, there are no "new eyes" that compare to having someone else read your work. Remember that every editor has the advantage of not being you. They don't have the whole essay uploaded into their brain in a way that makes it more difficult to see its flaws. Even if you think they're a worse writer than you, the freshness they bring to editing your work is a huge advantage. They are exactly that reader who's seeing your work for the first time.
Aside from editors, beta readers are also useful. Beta readers are readers who aren't "editors" but who are in your target audience and willing to give feedback on rough drafts. In Write Useful Books, Rob Fitzpatrick suggests having multiple rounds of beta readers before a book is finalized. Your target audience may not think about things exactly the way you do. And for your work to be successful, you'll need to know what works and doesn't work for them.
I don't use beta readers because the blog format is very informal—I can (and do!) update articles with new wording or examples when I get feedback that certain ideas weren't clearly expressed. But for a more "static" work like a book, beta readers can be very useful.
In a way, this tip feels like the most "boring" one in this article. But it fits the theme of my blog—I often write about awareness in the context of ultimate frisbee (see here or here). When I play chess, I notice how bad I am at awareness in a domain where I'm not an expert. Scott Alexander ends his article on writing advice saying:
There’s a pattern across almost all skills, where people start off doing things half-baked but sometimes with a bit of native talent. The experts teach them The Right Way To Do Things, and they switch to doing it in a stilted formulaic way that makes everybody else cringe...
Eventually you end up shouting “Just use your instincts!” at people who do not actually have instincts...Almost the only good advice in any discipline is “develop instincts, then use them”.
Finding ways to break out of our familiarity with our writing and freshly reassess it helps us develop instincts. In chess, ultimate frisbee, meditation, or writing, it's really hard to develop mindfulness. There's no easy path, we just have to be intentional about it, over and over, until those skills slowly strengthen.
#2. Be on a team with your readers
Working together with your readers is a powerful technique on multiple levels. First, it helps create a consistent 'voice' for your work. And second, it's one of the most powerful persuasion techniques we have. Let's discuss each of those.
In his post on writing advice, blogger Scott Alexander suggests:
use words like “me” and “you” instead of “a person” or “someone”. Compare:
“If someone does the calculations with this methodology, the result will probably be nonsense.”
Versus:
“If you do the calculations with that methodology, you’ll probably end up with nonsense.”
I think the second sounds snappier and more concrete.
A reader commented on the post, saying:
One thing that I think you do but don’t mention is to signal the reader that there is actually a human being on the other side of the page. That can be as simple as a casual reference to a book you are fond of and your reader is likely to recognize, or to something in your life that is relevant.
I like this comment and I think it connects to the idea above—using 'me', 'you', and 'us' plays a role in making the author a human being, as well.
In The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker makes a similar suggestion. He uses the metaphor of a writer and reader standing together, looking out on the world.
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself...prose is a window onto the world.
And since seeing implies seers, we no longer have to refer to paragraphs “demonstrating” some things and sections “summarizing” other things, as if blocks of printing had a mind of their own. The active parties are the writer and the reader, who are taking in the spectacle together, and the writer can refer to them with the good old pronoun we. That supplies him with still other metaphors that can replace metadiscourse, such as moving together or cooperating on a project:
[Bad:] The previous section analyzed the source of word sounds. This section raises the question of word meanings.
[Good:] Now that we have explored the source of word sounds, we arrive at the puzzle of word meanings.
[Bad:] The first topic to be discussed is proper names.
[Good:] Let’s begin with proper names.
All in all, working together with your reader is an effective writing style—you sound more human, your phrasing is more readable, and you have a consistent style.
But perhaps the bigger benefit of being together with your reader is that you'll be more convincing. This takes work—you have to actually try to figure out how your reader thinks, and work to present your ideas in a way that they actually feel like you're on the same team. To really do this right, you have to consider how that reader might see the world differently from you, and what names they're familiar with for the things you're looking at together.
It goes a step beyond what Steven Pinker suggested above—you can't just assume your reader is standing there next to you. You have to walk over to where they are and meet them there before you can look at the world together.
Here's what Scott Alexander says:
Crossing tribal signaling boundaries is by far the most important persuasive technique I know, besides which none of the others even deserve to be called persuasive techniques at all. But to make it work, you have to actually understand the signals, and you have to have at least an ounce of honest sympathy for the other side.
By "tribal signaling", he means the different phrases, ideas, or modes of thinking that are prevalent in different communities. If you want to appeal to an audience that doesn't share your beliefs, you can cross those boundaries by using the phrases and ideas that your audience is familiar with, even if it's not the way of thinking that comes most naturally to you.
For example, if you're writing in favor of some new legislation, you could appeal to a right-wing audience (in America) by arguing it will make the market freer and grow the economy. In a separate article, you could appeal to a more left-wing audience by pointing out how the same legislation will make life more affordable for people in poverty.
Of course, not all writing is on politically sensitive topics. Overall, the goal is to use terms and ways of thinking that your audience will be familiar with. In the general case, we might call it "appealing to your audience". When that audience has beliefs that are different from yours, we can give it the more specific name of "crossing tribal signaling boundaries".
(As an example of the general case: I don't use the phrase "tribal signaling boundaries" on my blog because I don't expect my readers to already be familiar with it. Scott Alexander does, because he knows his readers are.)
A commenter on another article I enjoyed put it this way:
If you can frame things more like you're trying to discover something with your reader rather than "here's the thing that I figured out and you've been so wrong" it can make people less likely to feel like they're losing status by agreeing with you.
It's embarrassing to be wrong. If you help your readers avoid that embarrassment (either by not forcing them to notice their wrongness, or by pointing out how you were previously just as wrong as they are), they'll be much more likely to stick around to hear what you have to say.
Scott calls this "the most important persuasive technique I know, besides which none of the others even deserve to be called persuasive techniques at all." This sounds hyperbolic, but research supports his claim. For example, here’s what David McRaney says in his book How Minds Change:
political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber examined more than one hundred published papers detailing attempts to influence voters’ opinions with mailouts, canvassing, phone calls, and television ads. Green and Gerber concluded it was highly unlikely any of them made any impact.
In his book, McRaney points out that "the truth is social"—we are more likely to believe what other people in our social circle also believe:
the latest evidence coming out of social science is clear: humans value being good members of their groups much more than they value being right, so much so that as long as the group satisfies those needs, we will choose to be wrong
If people believe what their groups believe, then the way to convince people is by first convincing them that we're in their group—in other words, by crossing those tribal boundaries. McRaney profiles a technique based on connecting with others called "deep canvassing", which is maybe the only persuasion technique that research has shown to be actually effective. I won't go into detail here, but you can think of deep canvassing as a combination of crossing tribal signaling boundaries and being a very good listener, in a face-to-face context. In contrast to those 100+ papers of ineffective persuasion, this technique gives us a chance to be convincing.
Wrapping up the book, McRaney's concluding thoughts continue to focus on persuasion through connection:
in any persuasion attempt, your priority should be to curate the conversation in a way that strengthens the relationship between you and the other person...you can communicate that you too have values like theirs, fears and anxieties, concerns and goals like they do. You just think the best way to deal with those issues is slightly different.
For more on convincing through connecting, I also like the book Conflicted by Ian Leslie. Two of his top "Rules of Productive Argument" are:
First, Connect: Before getting to the content of the disagreement, establish a relationship of trust.
Give Face: [...] The skilful disagreer makes every effort to make their adversary feel good about themselves.
These aren't books on Writing Advice (TM), but they speak to the effect we want to have with our writing—changing minds.
#3. Find your hidden redundancies
There's no benefit to wasting words. Being succinct saves our readers time. The more words it takes to share one idea, the more likely a reader will end up confused. We often say the same thing twice without meaning to—something that's clearly implied by one part of the sentence is made unnecessarily explicit by another phrase. Rooting out these unneeded repetitions makes our writing clear and concise.
The book Several Short Sentences About Writing has lots of good examples of this type of editing. Here are a few examples—an unedited sentence in italics, followed by the author's comments and an updated version of the sentence:
The air was hot and damp under the awning of branches and leaves that hung over us.
A common mistake—making explicit what’s already implicit. The air was hot and damp under the awning of branches and leaves.
The waves are loud as they crash against the beach.
Remove “as.” Assume that “crash” contains the quality of loudness. The waves crash against the beach.
What we do share in common, though, is our voice.
“Share” implies “in common.” And note how the force of the word “though” is already implicit in the very structure of the first four words—“what we do share.” What we do share is our voice.
And here's an example from Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style:
Much of my professional life consists of reading sentences like this:
Our study participants show a pronounced tendency to be more variable than the norming samples, although this trend may be due partly to the fact that individuals with higher measured values of cognitive ability are more variable in their responses to personality questionnaires.
…a pronounced tendency to be more variable: Is there really a difference between “being more variable” and “having a pronounced tendency to be more variable”? Even worse, this trend may be due partly to the fact that burdens an attentive reader with ten words, [but its] total content? Approximately zero.
Our participants are more variable than the norming samples, perhaps because smarter people respond more variably to personality questionnaires.
Here's a recent example I caught editing my own writing. I'd written the phrase "three different categories", but I realized I could just say "three categories". The word categories implies they're different—if they all belonged in one category, I wouldn't be able to separate them into three.
The phrase "it is important to note that..." is another good example. Its redundancy comes from the mutual trust between author and reader—you can trust your readers to assume that you are sharing important things with them, and not just wasting their time. Every sentence in your article should be "important to note"!
An important aspect of avoiding hidden redundancies is choosing the appropriate amount of uncertainty. I'd like to dig in to this a little, because finding the right balance of certainty is something I've needed to be intentional about. In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef writes that Ben Franklin purposefully avoided firm language:
Franklin paired his abundance of social confidence with an intentional lack of epistemic confidence. It was a practice he had started when he was young, after noticing that people were more likely to reject his arguments when he used firm language like certainly and undoubtedly. So Franklin trained himself to avoid those expressions, prefacing his statements instead with caveats like “I think...” or “If I’m not mistaken...” or “It appears to me at present...” (This also works as an example of "be on a team with your readers"!)
I try to give complex topics the nuance they deserve, so I appreciate this idea. But we don't need to be overly uncertain. Jacob of PutANumOnIt says "I write confidently and trust the readers to discount appropriately". He makes a valid point—phrases like "I think" or "I believe" are redundant, because your readers understand that reading your writing is reading the things you think and believe. I often delete a number of these phrases when I edit an article, while leaving in a few where I want to be extra intentional that I'm expressing an opinion.
I like the way this Less Wrong article discusses uncertainty. The author uses the catchphrase Don't let hedging be a tic. Here's their example:
Make sure you hedge precisely as much as necessary, and especially make sure you don't hedge the same claim multiple times in the same way. If "you suspect" something "might" happen, it doesn't also have to be "possible" that it "could" have "potentially" significant effects.
An example:
The other salient quality of insect suffering is its sheer scale. Insects are the most populous animals on the planet, so it may be that if their suffering is morally relevant at all, I believe it could swamp almost any other considerations about animal welfare.
Some hedging is virtuous here. We're dealing with uncertainty, so it'd be misleading to follow typical writing guides and say something bold like: "Because there are so many insects, their suffering adds up to more than that of larger animals." But in this example, the writer has gone too far. Taken literally, they are speculating on their own belief...They can just say what they believe full stop, and have easier-to-read and more literally accurate text. Something like:
Insects are the most populous animals on the planet, so I believe that if they can suffer in a morally relevant way, their suffering in aggregate might exceed that of larger animals.
We're importantly still hedging here! We're just not doing it in so many layers of the hypothetical that it becomes hard to read...
Deleting hidden redundancies and excess hedging is one of the main things I actually do when editing. I read a sentence and find a way to say the same thing in fewer words without losing any meaning.
Bonus Segment: A list of phrases to consider deleting
Let's take a quick breather. Here's a list of phrases I consider deleting when I edit. They're hints I'm being too vague, too wordy, or too redundant.
I think
this (often harder than you'd expect for your reader to figure out what you're referring to)
that (often a meaningless filler word)
feel / feel like
believe
could, might
seems like, kind of
sort of
probable
"in a sense"
some, at least
"be" or "doing" can be a signal that you're over-verbing
"the fact that", "in fact" (your readers assume you're not lying to them)
"the case that", "the idea that", "in a sense"
"It is important to note that"
definitely
"for me", "to me"
at all, may be
want to, try to
a bit, a little
person (what kind of person?)
#4. Simple syntax is fine
When our phrases get more complicated, our readers have to think harder to figure out what we mean. Some especially gruesome sentences are impossible for readers to figure out.
Don't be afraid to make your sentences simpler. I really like the way Julian Shapiro puts it in his writing guide:
The complexity of your writing should emerge from the strength of its ideas, not from how those ideas are worded.
Julian's suggestion gets to the core of my writing style. I find something I want to say. Something worth saying—something that, according to my research, hasn't been said before. And then I say it, as simply and clearly as I can. Find something uniquely beautiful and then make it as easy as possible for everyone else to see how uniquely beautiful it is, too.
You can use simple phrases to explain complicated ideas. There's no benefit in making your sentences so grammatically convoluted that your readers get lost. Write sentences simple enough that you're sure you understand them. And then make them even simpler, so your readers understand them too.
One surefire way to keep readers from getting confused is to make your sentences shorter. In On Writing Well, William Zissner says:
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough...There is no minimum length for a sentence that's acceptable in the eyes of God. Among good writers it is the short sentence that predominates...
When rewriting, I often find myself deleting an "and", and replacing it with a period. It's the right change to make more often than not.
But longer sentences have their place as well. Steven Pinker's advice in his book The Sense of Style has helped me write longer sentences without getting lost. It's a big book with big diagrams, so I'll rephrase his advice to highlight what's most relevant to us. Basically, he says write one 'full idea' as cleanly—in as few words—as possible. Only then move on to a new idea. Readers get lost when they have to hold half-an-idea in their minds while continuing to read. Often this can be rephrased as: put your verbs next to the nouns they belong with.
Let's look at an example in his book, quoted from a 1999 op-ed:
The view that beating a third-rate Serbian military that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians is hardly worth the effort is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.
He continues:
...this sentence ends bafflingly, with three similar phrases in a row: is brutally targeting civilians, is hardly worth the effort, is not based on a lack of understanding. Only with [a diagram] can you figure it out.
In the book, he provides that diagram, which you can see below. The diagram helps us parse the sentence, but the problem is simple enough to explain in words: ideas are left half-finished. We start with the phrase "The view..." and then we have to somehow attempt to hold it in our minds until we get to "is not based on a lack of understanding..." at the end of the sentence. I get a headache just trying to match up "beating a third-rate Serbian military" to its respective second half—"is hardly worth the effort".
I don't actually diagram my sentences, but the core of the lesson has stayed with me. When I revise a long sentence, my first thought is how can I get through one complete idea as quickly as possible? Long sentences are still possible—a second or third idea can be added after the first. But using this technique you'll create long sentences that the reader can actually follow. Leaving an idea half finished while the sentence continues its journey elsewhere is a recipe for disaster.
Final thoughts
There's lots of good writing advice that I haven't shared here. Perhaps the most basic and most important is Stephen King's famous suggestion: read a lot, and write a lot (and get feedback on that writing!).
Thanks for reading—and let me know your feedback.
Appendix: writing advice I liked more than average
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
On Writing Well by William Zinsser (especially Parts I & II)
Writing Better and How to punctuate by Julian Shapiro
Nonfiction Writing Advice by Scott Alexander