How to Write Clearly and Concisely

Our mutual friend, Seth Godin, wrote about this recently.

The attention span of an internet audience is getting shorter and shorter. They tolerate less. Before they're finished reading your your 80 word masterpiece of a sentence, they will have moved on to different sites.

Think of your own surfing habits. Do you read lots and lots and lots on one site? Probably not.

He clobbered the ball.  vs.   The ball was clobbered by him.

She loved her husband.  vs.   Her husband was loved by her.

They conquered the world.  vs.   The world was conquered by them.

We enjoyed our vacation.  vs.   Our vacation was enjoyed by us.

It sounds easy. It isn't.

Simple doesn't mean boring. It means language that your reader will understand the time she reads it.

Again, think of your audience. Get to the point using the simplest word available.

Example? In my technical editing, I come across utilize several times a day. Nothing wrong with it. It sounds more important than its simpler synonym, use.

So why do these highly intelligent and trained engineers utilize that form of the word? Why do they persist in utilizing its noun counterpart, utilization, when a simpler word like usage will work?

I don't know.

What I'm about to do is excruciatingly painful and can possibly ruin my stellar and unblemished credibility as a highly educated and experienced technical and business writer whose main 9-5 job is to create text that is readable, understandable, and vibrant, all of which do not necessarily point to the main reasons that I am read by hundreds if not thousands of people all over the world, of course, not including the seven or eight people at work that I must provide clearly written and readable prose because if I were to obscure my meaning and intent with run-on sentences, flowery but meaningless text, incredibly obnoxious sentence structure, and a dearth of punctuational flaws and grammatical miscues, I would be out of gainful if not meaningful employment, if you get my drift, which at this point should be fairly muddied.

Like I said, it was painful.

Keep your sentences short, or at least mix them up so that there are plenty of short sentences scattered among the longer sentences. Then people will want to read your work.

If a reader, any reader, must go back to reread the sentence because it was too long, then it was too long.

Remember that paragraph above? The huge run-on sentence that really didn't make any sense? Believe it or not, it is an actual sentence. Here's what it looks like without the punctuation.

What I'm about to do is excruciatingly painful and can possibly ruin my stellar and unblemished credibility as as highly educated and experienced technical and business writer whose main 9-5 job is to create text that is readable understandable and vibrant all of which do not necessarily point to the main reasons that I am read by hundreds if not thousands of people all over the world of course not including the seven or eight people at work that I must provide clearly written and readable prose because if I were to obscure my meaning and intent with run-on sentences flowery but meaningless text incredibly obnoxious sentence structure, and a dearth of punctuational flaws and grammatical miscues I would be out of gainful if not meaningful employment if you get my drift which at this point should be fairly obvious.

Yeah, you're right. It's unreadable.

Here's a general rule: if you would say the same phrase with a pause in your speech, put in a comma (read out loud what I just wrote and you'll see what I mean). If you come to a stop, put in a period.