To honor the New Year, we're rolling out a new blog structure. Entries will come twice a week. Tuesday entries will comment on developments in writing and editing, using recent examples from books and the media (stay tuned for the first entry in the series, on the disappearing that on January 8). Thursday entries, expanding on ClearWriter's long-running Tip of the Week, will offer concrete advice on fast fixes to improve writing. Our first Thursday entries, starting tomorrow, will deal with deft connections—how to connect words and phrases in structured and interesting ways to highlight your messages and inject order into your writing.

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.