How Smart People Can be Bad Writers (and What to Do?Instead)

There’s a big difference between being smart and writing smartly. School conditions you to believe sounding smart is rewarded. Reality rewards clarity over clever.

I always remember this one presentation I gave in my high school English Literature class. The teacher, who wasn’t always easy on me, seemed particularly fond of it, commenting on how articulate she thought it was. Nearly decades on, I now recall it as a costly lesson. Why? Because, I knew my ideas weren’t particularly any good. Nor had I delivered them in an engaging way. But, what I did do was string together many fancy words.

I realised then, that much of the school system rewards communicating in a way that “sounds smart”, rather than communicating smartly - the real world does not. And too many people forget to relearn how to write for real life in business - which doesn’t care about what worked in your English Lit class.

In this blog, we’ll discuss what mistakes can make smart people bad writers, and what to do instead. So, whether you’re the smartie pants, or coach team members who are, you can produce writing that can be easily read, not painfully deciphered.

1. Write for children, not adults

Just because you’re an adult, it doesn’t mean you should write for other adults.

In The Bezos Blueprint, Carmine Gallo highlights the importance of readability scores. Readability scores were first developed in the 1940’s by Dr. Rudolf Flesch. He isolated elements that make text easy or hard to read. This was based on average sentence length, words and other variables. The higher the score out of 100, the easier it is to read.

In the 1970’s, J. Peter Kincaid, who worked with Flesch, evolved this work. He converted the scores into an easier metric to interpret - grade levels.

If you’re writing for a Board, what ‘readability’ grade level should you strive for? Eighth grade. Research from the US has shown content written for eighth graders can be understood by 80 percent of the population. Jeff Bezos understood this well. Under his leadership, Amazon employees were instructed to write for eighth graders or lower.

In 2010, Jeff Bezos delivered a Commencement Speech to Princeton University graduates. The billionaire spoke to the ivy-leaguers in words fit for a seventh grader.

Writing for eighth graders means, despite your impressive vocabulary, do the hard work of choosing simpler words to explain your point. And make your point in less words.

2. Less is more. More is more a burden on your reader.

While it feels obvious, it's worth highlighting - less is more. With our always-on work culture of endless emails, notifications and deadlines, attention is scarce. As a smart professional, you can get so engrossed in your work that you forget no reader will ever care about it as much as you do.

As Todd Rogers and Jessica Laksy-Fink help emphasise in Writing for Busy Readers, complex writing puts a burden on the reader. Concise writing puts the onus on the writer. As the famous maxim from Blaise Pascal captured:

“I would have written a shorter letter if I’d had more time.”

Research has shown people tend to add words and content while editing when they should be removing them. When you include fewer ideas, words and requests, your reader is more likely to read your writing. The authors say:

“Concise writing requires a ruthless willingness to cut unnecessary words, sentences, paragraphs, and ideas.”

3. One point per sentence. When you confuse them you lose them.

As Writing for Busy Readers points out, even in academia, the focus is shifting towards more simple writing. The American Marketing Association instructs would-be authors that its journal is “designed to be read, not deciphered”.

Remember, humans evolved to speak before we learnt to write. And this is true for most people today too. Write the way you speak. Speaking more likely uses linguistic structures that are easier to understand. Read your writing out aloud to get a better feel of how it flows.

Eye-tracking studies show that readers pause when they process the end of a sentence. This implies we stop to process the meaning of the sentence. Complex sentences require the reader to hold more information in their minds at one time. So instead, make remembering the point easier for your reader.

Nancy Gibbs, former editor-in-chief for Time magazine, would advise her writers that every word had to earn its place in a sentence. And every sentence had to earn its place in a paragraph. And every idea had to earn its place in the text. This isn’t about cutting everything into the shortest possible messages. It’s about cutting what can be cut.

When you’re editing your writing, remember to trim the ‘split-ends’. A split-end sentence is a sentence that contains multiple ideas. Think multiple references. Or, perhaps a liberal use of commas. This approach requires the reader to hold several ideas in their mind at once. And remember, they aren’t as close to your ideas as you are. So, they likely won’t remember any of them. Or, they’ll remember less important points. Worse still, they’ll feel frustrated by the number of times they’ve had to re-read your writing.

4. Write for everyone, not an elite few

Smart people are used to feeling like the smartest person in the room. Side note, we already know, that if you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Communicate not to impress, but to be understood.

Writing for Busy Readers emphasises an under-appreciated point about ineffective writing - it’s also insensitive. It demonstrates disregard for readers with limited literacy, who speak English as a second language, or who have learning disabilities. So, effective writing is not only best practice - it’s democratic.

So, if you’re used to writing to sound smart, try these tips to switch to writing smartly instead.

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Dianne Glava?

Personal brand coach, speaker and consultant for executives, emerging leaders and business owners. Use personal branding to differentiate your trusted brand in the marketplace and build industry influence.

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