This is a checklist that I use at work to quickly sense check my drafts of strategy documents, tech proposals, PR reviews, project feedback, and other places where effective writing is helpful. It’s listing suggestions from the book On Writing Well   that I covered in this blog post . As I mentioned in the blog post I am not striving for perfection. Instead I want to be able to identify the main parts of my first draft that I can improve within 5–20 min of editing time.

Clear Thinking

• I am clear about what the main point of the article is, who my audience is, and why they should care.

Structure

• I have paid special attention to the first sentence and made it interesting.

• The first paragraph hooks the reader by being fresh, novel, paradox, humorous, surprising, unusual or starting with an interesting fact or question.

• The first paragraph tells the reader what the article is about and why they should care.

• Every paragraph is kept reasonable short and captures one logical idea.

• The last sentence of each paragraph entices the reader to keep reading.

• The article is not longer than it needs to be. It does not attempt to cover every aspect of the topic.

• I paid attention to the end. The end happens in a fitting, unexpected or surprising way that should keep the reader thinking about the text.

Unity

• The text is mostly written in one tense.
• The reader is addressed with the same pronoun.
• The tone is not changed (casual vs. formal, neutral vs. involved).

Words

• Every word is essential for the sentence and doing new work.
• Unnecessary adverbs are avoided.
• Unnecessary adjectives are avoided, e.g. “diligent code review”.
• Words that have shorter alternatives are replaced, e.g. “assistance” (help), “numerous” (many), “facilitate” (ease), “sufficient” (enough), “attempt” (try).
• Words that inflate importance are avoided, e.g. “with the possible exception of” (except), “due to the fact that” (because).
• Small qualifier words are removed: “a bit,” “a little,” “sort of,” “kind of,” “rather,” “quite,” “very,” “too,” “pretty much,” “in a sense”. Be confident in what you write.
• Active verbs are used over passive verbs, e.g. “Joe documented the architecture” over “The architecture was documented by Joe”.
• Concept nouns are replaced by active verbs. Instead of “The monitoring system is used to detect data drift.” use “We monitor our data to detect drift.”
• Verbs are precise: “The CEO resigned” instead of “The CEO left”.

Style

• Sentences are kept short.
• Sentences link logically to the next. If not, a link is explicitly provided.
• Avoid exclamation points unless for effect.
• Use contractions like “I’ll”, “I’ve”, but not “I’d” as this can mean both “I had” and “I would”.
• Always use “that” over “which”.

Tone

• Avoid business lingo and concept nouns, e.g. “incident management procedures”. Replace them with active verbs and plain talk.
• Try to write in a human way. Make people do things using active verbs.
• Resist trying to sound smart in work documents.
• Avoid sexism in language: “Software Engineers can spend more time with their families.” instead of “Software Engineers can spend more time with their wives and children.”