“Composition is a discipline; it forces us to think. If you want to ‘get in touch with your feelings,’ fine, talk to yourself; we all do. But, if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down and then cut out the confusing parts.”
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, William Safire
That last line. Then cut out the confusing parts. Deceptively simple, like all the advice that actually works.
And like all the advice that actually works, it’s brutally hard to execute.
Why is cutting the crap so difficult? Because the crap doesn’t look like crap when you wrote it. It looks like nuance. It looks like thoroughness. It looks like you, being thoughtful and comprehensive.
It’s not. It’s in the way.
The mind meld
You already know you should write to one person, right?
Unless you’re the Pope, and the verb pontificate was literally coined for your office, you’re not addressing the masses. You’re talking to one reader at a time, even if ten thousand people eventually read your work.
(Go ahead and picture crowds huddled around a monitor, toasting your new post. It’s a nice image. It has never happened.)
To reach that single reader, you need to organize your thoughts before sending them across the void from your mind to theirs. Writing forces this. Determining your message, ordering its presentation, and refining it until it’s clear, that’s the journey.
Aim your pen
Your writing needs a destination. The goal determines the path.
Want to persuade? Establish authority, provide proof, weave it into a compelling story. Use the one-two punch of logic and emotion.
Want to instruct? Even learners need convincing that your instruction is worth their time. Persuasion and teaching are dance partners, not strangers.
Want to discover? The research required to produce clear writing will expand your own knowledge. The Latin proverb got it right: “By teaching you will understand.”
Want to seduce? That’s not a dirty word in writing, it means drawing someone in so completely they forget they’re reading.
Most writing tries to do all of these at once and succeeds at none. Pick a primary aim. Let the others support it.
Now comes the real work
I call this The Subtraction Principle: the quality of your writing is not determined by what you put in, but by what you have the courage to take out.
Every piece of writing starts with excess, extra words, fuzzy logic, tangents that felt important in the moment. That’s fine. Write it all down. Get it out of your head.
Then become a surgeon.
Remove unclear phrases. Cut ambiguous constructions. Simplify the complex. Every word must justify its existence by adding meaning and moving your reader closer to the point.
Using more words doesn’t make your writing better. It makes your writing longer. Those are not the same thing.
Safire called this “the secret way” to bring order to your writing. But it’s not a secret anymore, you just read it. The question is whether you’ll actually do it.
Your move
Before you publish your next piece, cut 10% of the words. Not randomly, surgically. Remove the sentence that says the same thing as the one before it. Delete the adjective that doesn’t change the meaning. Axe the paragraph that wanders.
Read what remains. If it’s weaker, add something back. But it won’t be weaker. It never is.