How to Write Gooder

Good writing isn't hard. Well, yes it is, but by following certain procedures you can make it less hard. A lot less.

Here's something that's not a secret: Much of the writing on LinkedIn is terrible.

And even more relevant, it's terrible because it's cookie-cutter. People are saying the same things the same way. It's as if AI already took over business writing. Twenty years ago.

For better or worse (and as a published novelist, I feel it's for worse) most of the reading people do today, at least in the U.S., is business-related. When we're done with all our professionally-related reading for the day, we don't have time for books like Violet Rothko and Other Stories, excellent as it is, so we Netflix and chill. I get that. It simply means business writing needs to be better. We can do it.

Here's how:

Number one is what I just did: I dove right in.

Notice how so many articles—and videos—ramble on and on before getting to the subject of their snappy headline promise?

You'll see a headline that promises gold, but then the author talks about all sorts of things that have nothing to do with why you're there: (Notice how YouTube has that nifty feature now that shows the most viewed part of the video on the timeline, so you can go where most other people have found gold.) So often when readers or viewers encounter this verbal mish-mosh, they just skip to the next article or video. So the author got a "click" but didn't help anyone.

We're all busy people. Time is valuable. Get to the point.

Number two is related to what's above: Put the important stuff first. This used to be called "inverted pyramid style." I know why it's fallen out of style. The click-counters want you to go deep into an article, during which you're pelted with ads, before getting to the meat. And this sort of string-along writing has spread to practically everything now, probably led by a group of writers (Millennials, Gen Z) who've never read a newspaper and don't know any other way. The inverted pyramid style started out during the U.S. Civil War, believe it or not. Telegraphy, which was how articles were transmitted to newspaper HQs, was a new technology. Often it would fail in mid-story. So editors told their writers to put the most important information at the top, and narrow down to the less-important details as the piece progressed, so that the editor could round off the article if the connection broke. That led to newspapers becoming, by necessity, crisp and succinct.

Number three is don't assume people know everything about what you're talking about. If you're writing a technical article and you know your audience is going to be familiar with certain terms, fine. But I see articles that are flooded with acronyms and terms that are often very recent. Everyone may not know them! Or they may stand for something different to another person or in an adjacent profession. Most acronyms, for some odd reason, seem to have three letters, and there are only so many three-letter combinations to go around. You don't have to go as far as a well-known news anchor I once wrote for, who made me write "Federal Bureau of Investigation" because she feared someone might not know what "FBI" means. But when I see writing littered with capital letters referring to other capital letters that define other capital letters, things can get very frustrating. So often, especially online, I find how-to articles, the authors of which are trying to be helpful, but who only serve to frustrate further because they won't explain something you need to know for their solution to be useful. Don't tell me "WARNING: Be sure to run an EGX conversion before starting this process" without telling me what an EGX conversion is. And if I google it, I get five different meanings for EGX.

Number four is related to number three: Know your audience. This goes beyond merely explaining acronyms and jargon mentioned above. Constantly ask yourself who is reading and why. What are they expecting to get out of it? How can you get them to return? It's a tough one, I admit.

Number five is do what I've been doing here: Either bullet-point or number your points and put them in bold to set them off some way. In videos, have graphics that pop up to introduce each new section or topic, and those divisions on the timeline that divide the video into separately-labeled sections are immensely helpful too.

Number six: Write simply, and don't over-write. Oh Lord do I see this all the time—using ten words when seven of them are redundant. I think of all my below-average classmates in middle school who padded their papers with lots of words so the teacher would be impressed by the gravitas; they forget that the Bible opens with the simplest sentence imaginable to describe the creation of the universe. Notice I didn't say whole universe. So don't say something happened at 11:00 am in the morning, a person is initiating something for the first time, or an object oscillated back and forth. Something is just destroyed, not completely destroyed. There's no such thing as partially destroyed; that's what "damaged" means.

(Oh, and as an aside, don't say, as is so common to hear, "ec cetera." It's et cetera. There's no hard "k" sound. People just think there is because they see the "c" in the abbreviation "etc.")

Number seven: Spice things up! Lose the formal patois we all learned in school. Or mix it up the way you might wear jeans with a blazer and tie ("formal" and "patois"), and employ metaphors to make business writing more relatable and fun (wear jeans with a blazer and tie). You can use these and other tools to make the driest material interesting. This is how I did it in advertising, and it won many accounts for me and my agency.

Writing is fun! Never forget that. When I was in school I always assumed writing was the bone teachers threw to us after we did all our math. (Math always came in the morning.) I was astonished when I found out, in high school, that those writing assignments all those years had counted toward my GPA and and consequently I ranked 12th in a class of nearly 900 students. (My high school was the largest in the state—which means it was way too big.) That sense of fun—of exploration, or learning, of growth—through writing has never left me. Writing has never become a chore, which is why you'll never hear me use creaky phrases like "In conclusion," "Effective immediately," or "Deliverables." (Aren't those the coffee and pastries that come in the morning?) There's no reason to keep using the same stale expressions when English has 175,000 words, more than almost any other language.

I envy anyone about to embark on a writing project. Have fun!