How to write clearly

Does your writing tend to be a bit long, muddled or inconsistent? Many of my clients say they struggle to write clearly, even though they understand their subject well.

When a document is unclear, it takes people longer to read and understand it. It can leave readers feeling unsure, uncomfortable or unconfident about what they’ve read. Ultimately, it may mean your target audience doesn’t act on your content the way you intended them to. This wastes time and money; it can have even more serious consequences.

The most effective way to improve the quality of your writing is to invest more time in planning. But even if you haven’t used a writing plan, you can still make a document clearer by focusing on a few things while you write or edit it.

The following techniques all use plain-language principles. Applying them may involve changing some ingrained habits and being more disciplined in how you write. But with a little practice, and some ruthless editing, you and your readers will quickly see the benefits.

Use these techniques to write clearly

Technique 1: Get to the point quickly

Busy people don’t have time to guess what a document is about, or flick through to find out why it’s relevant to them. Don’t start a document with a long explanation of the background and context. Instead, use your first paragraph to tell your readers why you have written the document and how you expect them to use it.

Technique 2: Use headings to tell your story

Documents that are full of long paragraphs take time to read and decipher. Headings structure a document and help readers quickly get a sense of its purpose and content. Descriptive headings or ‘headlines’, which present a series of key points, make it easy for readers to skim read a document.

Technique 3: Use a separate paragraph for each point

Limit each paragraph to one topic. This makes it easier for your readers to focus, understand and remember your messages and the information that supports them. It also helps keep your paragraphs short, which makes your document quicker to read.

Technique 4: Keep sentences short

Long sentences that contain a string of ideas are hard to follow. Readers may have to read them more than once to understand what they mean. Instead, limit each sentence to one idea and no more than 20 words. This means that each idea will stand out equally. It also means you’re less likely to make grammar or punctuation mistakes.

In Word, ‘Document stats’ in the Editor function gives you readability statistics for your document, which includes the average sentence length. These are the readability statistics for this article:

Technique 5: Use lists

One way to break up a long paragraph or long sentence is to present the content in a list. A list makes it easier to show complex information logically and consistently, which helps readers understand it quickly. Lists also make the layout of a document more interesting. This article explains how to write a bullet list.

Technique 6: Get rid of unnecessary words

Even with the discipline of using short paragraphs and sentences, your writing may still be longwinded. Writing succinctly makes your content shorter, quicker and easier to read, and less likely to be misunderstood. Here are more tips on how to write concisely and get rid of unnecessary words.

Technique 7: Use a clear layout

A clearly written document can still appear confusing and disorganised if it is badly formatted.

Don’t be afraid to keep plenty of white space in your document, as it makes it easier to read. Create white space with wider margins, and line and paragraph spacing. A ragged right margin is easier to read than fully justified text.

Consult your organisation’s style guide for advice on which fonts and font sizes to use for the body text and headings. Take care to use bold, italics and underlining sparingly and consistently. In general, use bold to add emphasis, italics to indicate the title of a published document or scientific name, and underlining to indicate a hyperlink.

Finally, get into the habit of using Word styles, which make it easy to apply consistent formatting.

 

Capire is a leading New Zealand writing consultancy for governments, NGOs and international development agencies. We help organisations transform their complexity into plain English. Find out more about how we can help your organisation or sign up for our newsletter to get more tips to improve your writing.