Clear Writing Rules

1) Know your outcome. To make sure your writing gets the response you want, first you have to know what that is. What do you want to achieve in your writing? What do you want the reader to get out of it? When you have finished writing, second position the reader. Read what you have written and see if the message comes across. Remember the NLP presupposition 'the meaning of the communication is the response it gets'.

2) Take care of the basics. Check your spelling and punctuation. Mistakes are embarrassing and damage your credibility with the reader. Do not rely on the word processor to check these. It only has artificial intelligence. You have real intelligence.

3) Use nouns and verbs in preference to adjectives and adverbs. They are nearly always stronger. Adverbs (words that describe verbs) and adjectives (words that describe nouns) can be useful, but use them sparingly.

4) Beware of nominalizations. They are weak because they are not sensory specific. Reading a paragraph full of nominalizations is like wading through jelly. Use many nominalizations only if you want to put the reader into a trance.

5) Use sensory-specific details when possible. Illustrate abstract points with concrete metaphors. Make metaphors clear and relevant. Sometimes you can refer back to them when developing a point (organizing metaphors).

6) Match your nouns and verbs. This will reduce ambiguities. If in doubt about something, read it aloud to someone else. If still in doubt, change it. (I read an advertisement recently that said, 'Are your worries killing you? Let us help')

7) Track your verbs. The strongest verbs are those that involve doing something. The next strongest involve dialogue - saying, speaking. The next strongest involve thinking or feeling. Weaker still are the passive forms of verbs - being done to. Watch for all forms of passive verbs where the subject is deleted and only the action remains, for example 'The house was bought.' Weakest of all is the verb 'to be', unless it is part of another verb (as in 'to be interested', for example). Look through your writing and substitute a stronger verb where appropriate.

8) Look at the way you lay out the writing. Long paragraphs in small type are hard to read. Avoid long sentences, with lots of clauses and sub-clauses, word upon word for the sake of it, as if the full-stop key is not working, sometimes with ideas nested in others, like Russian dolls at a Moscow fair, as they are hard to understand, aren't they? The clearest way to lay out informational writing is inductively. Start with the main points and then proceed to the smaller chunks. Imagine a pyramid with a few main ideas at the top and then more and more subsidiary ideas. Start at the top, not at the bottom.