On Writing Clearly
Clear writing is clear thinking. A few principles I've come to rely on when the words aren't coming out right.
There’s a test I run on every paragraph I write: can I say this in half the words without losing anything real? If the answer is yes, the paragraph doesn’t make the cut. Not because brevity is a virtue in itself, but because excess words are a symptom — they mean I haven’t quite figured out what I’m trying to say.
This is the uncomfortable truth about writing: you can’t separate the quality of your prose from the quality of your thinking. Muddled sentences are muddled thoughts wearing a coat. Cleaning up the sentences forces you to clean up the thoughts.
Start with the thing you actually want to say
Most drafts bury the main point in paragraph three. The first two paragraphs are warm-up — the writer talking to themselves, establishing context they already have. Cut those and start at paragraph three. Then notice that paragraph four is probably the real point, and paragraph three is its warm-up.
Keep cutting until you hit bone.
This sounds brutal, but it’s not. You’re not throwing away the thinking — you’ve already done it. You’re just removing the scaffolding that held the thinking in place while you were building. The reader doesn’t need the scaffolding. They need the building.
Use simple words for complex ideas
The more complex the idea, the simpler the words should be. This is counterintuitive. If you’re explaining something hard, your instinct is to reach for technical vocabulary — it feels precise, authoritative. But precision and complexity are not the same thing.
Technical vocabulary exists to compress ideas that practitioners already share. Among peers, “latency” is more efficient than “the time it takes for a response to arrive.” But writing for a general audience with insider vocabulary isn’t precision — it’s a wall.
When Richard Feynman explained quantum mechanics, he found analogies in everyday things: rubber bands, spinning tops, water ripples. He wasn’t dumbing it down. He was doing the hard work of translation that most physicists skip.
Prefer the concrete to the abstract
Abstract writing is writing that refers to other writing. Concrete writing refers to the world. “Difficult economic conditions” is abstract. “The factory closed and her rent was due Friday” is concrete.
Concrete details do several things at once: they’re more vivid, they’re harder to argue with (you can dispute an abstraction, but not a specific fact), and they make the reader trust you — because you’ve clearly been somewhere and seen something.
The move from abstract to concrete is often just one step: ask yourself what you actually mean. “Many people feel alienated by modern technology” — what people? Doing what? Where? When you answer those questions, you have a concrete scene to write about.
Revise by reading aloud
Your eye skips over errors on the page. Your ear catches them. Read your draft aloud, at a normal pace. Wherever you stumble, hesitate, or feel the urge to skip a word — that’s a problem. Sentences that look fine on screen often sound terrible spoken: too long, too many nested clauses, too many words that start with the same letter.
Reading aloud also reveals rhythm. Good prose has rhythm. Not the forced rhythm of someone who has read too much Hemingway, but the natural rhythm of speech — varying sentence lengths, the occasional short punch, the longer one that builds and builds until it releases.
None of these rules are absolute. The best writers break all of them. But you have to earn the right to break a rule, and you earn it by first understanding why the rule exists.
Write plainly until you can’t. Then, carefully, see what happens when you don’t.