What I learned from On Writing Well

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Writing a good blog post that summarises William Zinsser’s classic book On Writing Well is stressful. I don’t want to break his rules while writing about them. I will attempt this anyway since I learned a lot from his book.

Notes that I write for myself are pretty sloppy, unstructured, and stream-of-consciousness, but I care about my writing when others read it. Unfortunately, my most regular readers at the moment are probably my work colleagues. I often draft project or strategy documents that others need to understand and engage with. I am trying hard to keep the style non-corporate and maybe even a bit fun to read.I probably use too many self-made memes.I don’t think William Zinsser considered tech guys writing data strategy documents part of his target audience, but his advice is universal.

William Zinsser argues in his book that an average reader has an attention span of 30 secondsAn estimate he made in the pre-social media year of 2006. and that their attention is competing with a dozen alternative activities. He argues that the key to good writing is clear and engaging structure, simplicity, and, in the context of business writing, humanity. I will share my takeaways and a checklist that I use during my writing process.

Structure - Clear thinking produces clear writing

When writing, you should think clearly about what you want to say. Illogical and bad writing is a result of being unsure about the purpose and structure of the text. We all can relate. Writing is an iterative process. You often start an article with different ideas and arguments than when you reach the end. During the writing process you come up with better arguments that you want to include or that you can explain better. This is natural and you should enjoy the process of editing and deleting to ensure your first draft gets a coherent structure.

Ask yourself: “Did I write what I wanted to say?” and “Can my reader easily follow my narrative from the first paragraph to the last?” The second question relates to the earlier idea of a lazy reader, who will stop reading if they are not hooked or need to spend brain power to follow your train of thought. How do you avoid that?

The most important sentence of your writing is the first one. It must induce the reader to read the second sentence. The second sentence must do the same for the third sentence and so on. The goal is to hook the reader in the first paragraph. Zinsser calls this “the lead” and it should achieve two things:

To be an effective hook it should be: fresh, novel, paradoxical, humorous, surprising, unusual or be an interesting fact or question. It needs to force the reader to keep reading.
It needs to tell the reader what the article is about and why they should care.

Once the reader is hooked, ensure that the last sentence of each paragraph entices them to continue to the next. The end of a paragraph is often a natural stopping point. The paragraphs should be kept short and reflect one idea. Once you have said what you wanted to say, stop. Be comfortable dropping material. Decide which part of the subject you want to cover. Cover it well and then stop.

How do you end your piece the right way? Try to encapsulate the main idea of the text and end in a fitting, unexpected or surprising way. Like a good dessert, the last paragraph or sentence should be a joy in itself and linger for a moment after the end.

Simplicity - Make it easy for your readers

Like good structure, simplicity helps your reader stay engaged. Unfortunately, while you write you will accumulate clutter. This can be words that do not add value or sentences that are difficult to follow. You can achieve simplicity by ensuring that:

every word in a sentence is doing new work
sentences are short and logically linked together.
you have unity in choice of tense, pronouns, and style

Zinsser argues that writing improves proportionally to the number of things you can keep out of it that should not be there. Be critical of the words you choose and avoid:

Words that do not do extra work, e.g. “a personal friend of mine” does not add more than “a friend”.
Unnecessary adverbs. “I wrote up the documentation”. “up” is not required. “My algorithm is decidedly better than brute-force”. “decidedly” does not add anything.
Avoid adjectives unless absolutely necessary, e.g. do not write “diligent code review” unless your company does not care about code reviews.
Words that have shorter alternatives, e.g. “assistance” (help), “numerous” (many), “facilitate” (ease), “sufficient” (enough), “attempt” (try).
Words that inflate importance, e.g. “with the possible exception of” (except), “due to the fact that” (because), “he totally lacked the ability to” (he couldn’t), “for the purpose of” (for).
Remove the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: “a bit,” “a little,” “sort of,” “kind of,” “rather,” “quite,” “very,” “too,” “pretty much,” “in a sense”.
Prefer active verbs over passive, e.g. “Joe documented the architecture” over “The architecture was documented by Joe”.
Nouns that express a concept are commonly used in bad writing instead of verbs that tell what somebody did. Instead of “The monitoring system is used to detect data drift.” use “We monitor our data to detect drift.”
Use precise verbs: “Start a company” instead of “Set up a company”. “The CEO resigned” or “The CEO was fired” instead of “The CEO stepped down”.

After applying these rules your sentences should be clear and stripped of clutter. Now your job is to ensure that sentence B follows logically from sentence A. Also ensure that sentence F does not repeat the same argument made in sentence A. If the connections are not clear, provide the missing link. My favourite quote in the book is on the question of sentence length. Zinsser advises: “If you want to write long sentences, be a genius.”

Aside from a careful choice of words and logical sentences, you should strive for unity in:

tense. Stick to one tense.
pronouns. Use the same pronoun to address your reader.
tone. Are you writing casually or formally, involved or detached, ironic or amused?
style. Are you writing a Wikipedia entry, a personal travel story, or a tech strategy?

Decide on these points at the beginning and do not change unless necessary.

Humanity - Plain talk, not vanity

After you have internalised the advice from the previous two sections you can start applying it at work. What could go wrong?

People at work have a tendency to write in a pretentious style, e.g. “The company uses evaluative procedures for our objectives based on our KPIs.”

Instead of dead concept nouns like “evaluative procedures” use active verbs and plain talk, e.g. a better way is “We will evaluate our progress based on our KPIs.” You should aim to stay natural and write how you talk. A good test is to ensure your colleagues can visualise who is doing what when they read your sentence.

To incorporate Zinsser’s advice in my own writing, I created this checklist that I refer to after completing a first draft. I am not striving for perfection. I don’t want to become an author for The New Yorker magazine or win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Instead, I want to focus on the ~20% of changes that lead to the largest quality improvement.

Communication on staticnotes.org

What I learned from On Writing Well

Structure - Clear thinking produces clear writing

Simplicity - Make it easy for your readers

Humanity - Plain talk, not vanity