Think back to your school English classes. If they were anything like those we sat through, “writing instruction” was often about grammar rules and principles: endless hours spent diagramming sentences, identifying restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, and learning such “laws” of usage as “never end a sentence with a preposition.”

There’s just one problem. You can master these skills and be no closer to effective, memorable writing. At the core of our philosophy is the conviction that good writing is more than correct grammar.

Correct grammar isn’t enough for good writing. Nor is it necessary. Consider the following sentence:

The times were the best that they had ever been, but they were also the worst that they had ever been.

Not a grammatical error to be found, but still the prose is lifeless and confusing. Of course, the original is better:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The original is more rhythmic and poetic. It’s also a grammatically incorrect wrong run-on sentence. And it’s more powerful for it.

There’s an alternative to focusing exclusively on grammar.

Far more effective for learning good writing is taking apart the best writing to see what makes it tick. At ClearWriter, our approach is to examine writing we admire, from newspapers, magazines, books, and annual reports, seeking patterns that we can identify, imitate, and teach. The straightforward techniques in this blog—and those in our premium products—will to help you develop an attractive style, going beyond obsessing over grammar rules, real or imagined.

The next entry discusses one of the most important patterns we’ve found: brevity and directness. We’ll also explain when to follow this pattern (hint: almost always) and when to discard it.

Where did ClearWriter come from? A good place to start is founder Bruce Ross-Larson’s first assignment as a budding editor:

Cut 2,200 pages of economic reporting on Korea to 600 and render its jargon in eloquent, compelling language—without infuriating its authors.

Before long, Bruce realized that he was making the same edits again and again, so he wrote each “standard edit” on a note card, to remind himself later. The note cards soon filled a shoebox. Then they filled a drawer. And then a cabinet.

From these cards—and years of working on books and flagship reports for such institutions as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Bruce’s day job as president of Communications Development Incorporated—came the core of ClearWriter’s philosophy.

Good writing can be taught, and it’s more than correct grammar.

Bruce expanded on this idea in five books, published by W.W. Norton, Edit Yourself, Stunning Sentences, Powerful Paragraphs, Riveting Reports, and Writing for the Information Age. The spread of the Internet, with its scalability and interactivity, offered an even more compelling way to deliver this message. ClearWriter was born.

This blog was a logical next step, allowing us to talk with our readers about our passion—good writing and how to create it. We hope you’ll join the conversation.

This is a blog about writing and editing. Its goal is to start a conversation with our readers about our passion—good writing and how to create it.

Who are we, exactly? We are a diverse group of writers and editors, some with decades of experience, others more newly minted. At Communications Development Incorporated, we spend the bulk of our days drafting, editing, and producing documents for such clients as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Center for Global Development—everything from internal working papers and proposals to academic journal articles and flagship reports. Based on this experience, we created ClearWriter, a complete system of writing improvement products that includes online training, ClearEdits editing software, and instructor-led workshops. The idea was to distill the strategies and tools we’d developed over the years into a series of simple, easy-to-use techniques, to help people write clearly and quickly.

The blog is an outgrowth of that project, allowing us to do things we couldn’t in other venues. We’ll share some tips and techniques from our premium products. We’ll discuss new tools and strategies as we develop them. And we’ll comment on current developments affecting the world of writing and editing—stylistic evolutions, new products, or simply books and articles we find interesting. In all these projects we look forward to your questions, comments, and even corrections, because black-and-white rules are rare in writing; rules that don’t change and evolve are rarer still.

The next few entries will give a broad picture of how we think about writing and editing. We’ll detail three core parts of our system.

• Good writing is more than correct grammar.
• Brevity and directness are the building blocks of effective writing.
• The 80/20 principle is the key to efficient writing and editing.

We’ll then outline how to put these ideas in practice in the key areas of writing—in planning well designed books, essays, and reports, in drafting stunning sentences and powerful paragraphs, and in editing drafts to make them as clear and as effective as possible.

Better writing can make a huge difference for just about anyone. How you write often shapes how you are perceived—as competent and insightful or as hesitant and disorganized. Whether you write emails to clients, essays for teachers, or annual reports for shareholders or donors, we believe that the techniques in this blog and in our products can help you write clearly and quickly. We look forward to your help as we strive to understand more about the keys to good writing and how to create it.