Perhaps 95% of basic sentence-level edits are straightforward and rote—repeatable, habitual, even Pavlovian.

Editors often can’t turn those reflexes off. That’s why you may find your editor friends grousing about playbills and restaurant menus.

The good news is that you can learn the patterns of editing (what we call standard edits)—not to annoy your friends by critiquing the church newsletter, but because doing so is the fastest way to write clearly and quickly.

That’s the foundation of the ClearWriter system. And we’ve already done much of the work, by compiling the standard edits we’ve discovered in our daily work as writers and editors.

Consider phrases like the field of (as in “the field of economics”), the area of (“the area of education research”), the problem of (“the problem of poverty”), and the like.

These phrases are fat that lards your writing.

Economics is a field; education research, an area; poverty, a problem.

Cut them.

Also easily fixed with standard edits is the tendency to use overweight words—words that are long, abstract, or obscure—where simpler words will do. So change component to part, lengthy to long, and utilization to use.

Such changes may seem to make little difference, and it’s true that they reflect preferences rather than rules. But you’ll be amazed at the results when you iterate these edits over a manuscript.

In future blog entries, we’ll talk more about the patterns we’ve found in editing. The best places to learn about them, however, are in our online writing training and in Edit Yourself, by ClearWriter founder Bruce Ross-Larson. Another good resource is our editing software, ClearEdits, which puts an editor inside your computer—taking advantage of the repeatability of our standard edits.

Most people use three or four basic sentence constructions—the simple, compound, and complex sentences taught in all composition books.

• I came to New York to write. (simple = one independent clause)
• I came to New York to write, but it took decades to find a publisher. (compound = two independent clauses)
• Because I was naive and optimistic, I came to New York to write. (complex = one dependent clause and one independent)

What most people do to give their sentences variety is merely to multiply their subjects, verbs, objects, complements, phrases, even clauses:

Because I was naive and optimistic, because I wanted to make a dent in literature, and because I needed a change in the direction of my life, I came to New York, which is a font of inspiration for artists of all types, to taste reality, to test limits, to write about both, and to hope for recognition.

Grammatically correct, but . . .

How do you get from the common to the stunning? Not by diagramming sentences, though that’s a good start toward understanding a sentence’s pieces. And certainly not by viewing sentences as simple, compound, or complex. We tried both, but neither led us to understand how good writers use sentence structures to make their writing sing. It was only when we began trying to identify what was unusual about a sentence—a dramatic flourish, an elegant repetition, a conversational injection—that we began to see patterns.

So, to move from the common to the stunning, look for patterns in good writing that you can emulate. The idea is to build an arsenal of such patterns. Careful composition of each sentence may seem painstaking, but it is fundamental to developing an individual style. And it gets easier as you go. In a single sentence you can convey tone, style, and message.

But follow the dictum that spare use is superior to frequent use, which can quickly careen into cliché.

In future blog entries and in our online writing training, we’ll show you how to strike that balance—and how to use dozens of patterns for writing stunning sentences.

What are the building blocks of writing? Letters, words, sentences? Arguments can be made for each.

But if you write to argue, persuade, or explain, the best answer is paragraphs.

Many writers think of a paragraph as collection of sentences framed by an indent and a carriage return, running perhaps 10 or 12 lines. Few have the language to describe what’s good—or bad—about a paragraph. Our techniques show you what it means for a paragraph to be unified, coherent, and well developed.

A paragraph is unified if each sentence is clearly related to the point. It is coherent if you make it obvious to your reader how each sentence is linked to the point. And it is well developed if its sentences unfold in a way that makes your argument perfectly clear to the reader.

The difficulty is putting these ideas into action. The key is recognizing and imitating the patterns of good paragraphs, which we’ll show you in future blog entries and in our online writing training.

Consider an example:

One of the best ways to make sure that a paragraph is well developed is to express the point in the first sentence and then to support it with details and examples in subsequent sentences. This method is as effective as it is popular—perhaps two-thirds of all sentences in expository writing are of this form.

But using other paragraph models (judiciously) can give your writing greater pace and power. Conclude with your point. Ask a question and answer it. Undermine a premise to make the opposite point. 

These are just a few possibilities.

Do you floss daily? Eat your vegetables? Work out?

Here's another: Do you plan before you write?

We know that these things are good for us.Whether we do them is less certain.

Just like dental care, healthy diet, and exercise, good planning will save you in the long run. The idea is to separate thinking from writing, for to do two things at once is to do both badly.

Most writers start by assembling details, examples, and comments in paragraphs—sporadically making points, rarely conveying a message. Our approach is to do the reverse—to start with your messages, to support them with points, and to use those points to assemble your details, examples, and comments.

We suggest that you begin by answering a few basic questions about your topic, audience, and purpose. Next, come up with your main message and three or four supporting messages. Then use those messages to develop an outline, and move beyond that to formulate a detailed paragraph-by-paragraph plan for your first draft.

That may seem simple, but doing it well takes practice. Take, for example, a planning session we held for an international financial organization’s flagship report. We started with a simple question.

Who’s your audience?

The answers dribbled out. First: “government officials.” After a pause: “people in the development community more broadly. And then a flood: “The press, graduate students, those in nongovernmental organizations, the public.”

In just a few sentences, the audience mushroomed to 6 billion people, too large to help with planning.

So the key isn’t just asking the right questions. It’s also knowing the answers to look for. Our techniques show you how to go beyond the simple outlining you learned in school with powerful planning tools, useful for whatever your field and whomever your audience.

For more information, visit our online writing training page.

Many of us know how to make our writing clear, concise, and appealing.

But looming deadlines mean that we must often settle for less than our best. While you might go through a dozen drafts of a cover letter or an application essay, you can’t do the same for that report or memo due tomorrow. 

That’s why ClearWriter focuses on the areas that make the biggest difference to your writing in the shortest time—to make your writing 80% better with only 20% of the effort (an idea called the Pareto principle).

The key is picking the right 20% to focus on. At ClearWriter we emphasize three areas where the payoffs are highest.

Planning intelligently. Most writers start by assembling details, examples, and comments in paragraphs—sporadically making points, rarely conveying a message. Our approach is to do the reverse—to start with your messages, to support them with points, and to use those points to assemble your details, examples, and comments. It’s easier said than done, but good planning will slash time from writing, rewriting, and editing. And it’s essential for writing in teams. Bad planning can cost organizations hundreds of hours.

Focusing on the areas that readers notice most. Titles, captions, and introductory paragraphs draw your readers’ attention, shaping their impressions for better or worse. Many readers will read only these elements. Making sure that they are flawless—and that they communicate your messages—will help you put your best foot forward.

Exploiting proven patterns for writing and editing. Good writing isn’t a mystery. We’ve taken apart the best writing to see what makes it tick, and we’ve compiled easy fixes for the most common problems. So, if your writing is full of such overweight phrases as “in relation to,” change these to “on” or “about.” Or consider the following passage:

Americans are struck by an annual outbreak of filial sentiment on Mother’s Day. They make more long distance calls on Mother’s Day than on any other day of the year.

Such successions of two sentences with the same subject are as common as they are uninteresting. But the first sentence can be converted to an introductory phrase to build anticipation:

Struck by an annual outbreak of filial sentiment, Americans make more long distance calls on Mother’s Day than on any other day of the year.

Such patterns, which improve writing with a change of position and the cutting of a few words, are the key to writing better in less time.

The next few entries will outline how we apply these three principles to the main steps in any piece of writing: planning, drafting paragraphs and sentences, and editing.

Communicate your ideas as clearly as possible, using no more words than needed.

That’s our war cry for writing and editing. Here’s why:

• Forcing your readers to slog through needless words shows a lack of respect for their time.
• Talking around your points shows poor command of the material, if done accidentally, or condescension for your reader, if done for purposeful obfuscation.  
• Writing directly is democratic, allowing a broader audience to consider your ideas and agree or disagree.
• Most writing authorities champion brevity as a key virtue. Strunk’s command to “omit needless words” encapsulates—and exemplifies—the goal.

There are equally many reasons why writers fail to reach that goal. Perhaps the most common is not knowing how. Much of what we read is too wordy, yet we imitate the style, unconsciously or consciously. And if we do not fully understand the topic we’re writing about, producing direct and concise prose is even more difficult. After all, it’s hard to take a straight path when you don’t know the way.

Sometimes indirect and wordy prose is more calculated. Legions of abstract words and tangled clauses often march around underweight ideas. Some writers believe that complicated ideas demand complicated writing. The opposite is closer to the truth. The more complicated your ideas, the more you should strive for concise and direct prose, to avoid making your readers’ task even more difficult.

The idea is not to be brief all the time or even most of the time. The idea is to be brief unless you have a reason not to be. Even if you have a reason not to be brief, there are ways of handling writing that make it easier for your readers to follow what you’re saying.

In coming blog entries and in our online writing training, we’ll show you how.

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.