Without doubt one of my most valuable career skill has been my ability to write clearly and persuasively. Written communication, no matter what you are doing, is an incredible skill to master. The ability to clearly and effectively communicate is a critical part of your ability to influence change in the world. Whether you are writing articles, business documents or even just emails, effective writing has never been more important. Here are some of my best tips to keep in mind to improve your writing.

The funnel

Writing is about conveying ideas, to do this you need to take the reader through a journey. To help give context for your writing, think about a funnel. Wide at the top and tapering to a narrow, focused end. Your writing should follow the same process. The start of the journey is to provide context. This is the widest part of the funnel and gives people the background of the story. This is setting the stage for the rest of the article and gives the reader everything they need to understand the core argument of the piece and gives your writing clarity and background. As you continue to develop the piece, you go through more and more detail until you get to the argument or core of the piece with is a focused, narrow argument which is well supported by context. Keep this in mind as you are brainstorming the layout of your piece.

Laying out

So you have an understanding of the journey you want to take the reader on, but before you start your writing, you need to think clearly about the goal of the piece and what you are trying to say. You need to know where you want the readers to land at the end of your writing. The way that works best for me is to open up a blank page and start with a title (it doesn’t have to be THE title). This will be the anchor of your piece. Then brainstorm what you want to say and what arguments you want to use. Don’t think about the quality of this section, just start getting words on the page. As you do this and cross things out and follow the idea around your head, some key pillars of the content will present themselves. As they do, highlight them. Once you have 2 or 3 key subheadings and a decent amount of background thinking you can start assembling the story.

Getting it down

Open up a new document and write out your title and subheadings. From there, the actual writing part is easy. All you are doing is assembling your ideas and clarifying the subheadings. Add an introduction paragraph and a conclusion tying your ideas up and you are good to go.

This layout works for essays, grant writing, emails, copy, creative writing, everything. It’s how I wrote this!

After you have finished the layout and assembly of the piece, now you need to carefully edit the writing. The first editing pass for me is the knock out any silly mistakes or grammar and spelling. Make sure that the piece makes sense and is logical. Then I go through another edit for clarity and brevity, which is where the ‘so what’ filter comes in.

So what?

The ‘so what’ filter is an editing process that helps you to write much more clearly. Basically, as you read a line or section, think to yourself ‘so what’, what does that line say and what does it mean? How does it push the narrative forward. This really helps to create a clear though line in your writing and allows the reader to clearly follow the logic of your argument or story. This is an important editing process that if you do it enough, becomes second nature. The goal of this edit is to remove as much fluff as you can. I have found that I add a lot of useless clarification to my writing that I don’t need so this is a really important part of my process.

Lastly, remember the quote from the late, great Steve Jobs, “Real artists ship”, share your work, they won’t help anyone if the ideas are trapped in your head.

-Sam