How to write clearly and quickly--a system in three parts

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.