Most Writers Lose Their Readers Because They’re Lacking One Thing

It’s not what you write, it’s the way you write it

Eloquence. What a beautiful word. Here’s how to achieve it as a writer.

The problem most promising writers have is as follows. You’re a hive of ideas and energy, you want to write about what you love. Who doesn’t? But you’re failing at something because readers aren’t paying attention. Your hard work, your great idea, and, most importantly, your passion isn’t being received. Nobody reads, nobody comments, nobody seems to care.

This goes for any kind of professional writing—press releases, marketing copy, conference papers, creative writing and articles. Even emails to colleagues count here.

What’s happening? Well, the question should be “What’s not happening?” The answer is usually “eloquence.”

Steve Martin joked, “Some people have a way with words, other people not have way.”

What makes somebody eloquent? Fluidity, persuasiveness, no verbiage, no erring, no um-ing, and ah-ing.

Eloquent people also tend to speak in a clipped and slow manner. They paint with words. We mere mortals insecurely over-talk to try to get our point across. The eloquent have confidence in brevity, and their brevity is confidence. The essence of eloquence is conveying a lot with few words.

One of the most important lessons I learned as I struggled is to keep sentences simple. I came up with a motto for writing — “simplicity is poetry”. What I mean by this is that the more simple writing is, the more beautiful it is. So it’s in my interest to keep it simple.

I used to think long words and complicated sentences would impress people. But they don’t. I now parse through my sentences looking for difficult words that could be swapped for simpler ones.

This is not to say sentences should always be short. It’s important for pacing that sentences should vary in length and rhythm to keep the reader engaged in the same way they would be if they were listening to you.

See, that was a thirty-word sentence. It didn’t read like one because it came at the right time.

Eloquent writers have an uncanny way of writing like they are speaking directly to you. It’s mesmerizing. They use painted, emotive tones, confident that the reader can connect them. With symmetry and cadence they write lines as crisp as proverbs.

Ironically, it takes a lot of practice to write as you speak. It takes even more to write like you’re speaking directly to the reader.

If you struggle as a writer, like I do, you probably don’t need more ideas, you just need more eloquence. Ideas come and go. If we’re ready for an idea, we can seize it and put the work into honing it.

That’s where the craft comes in — the hard work of making the idea tangible to others. Eloquence is worn in by habit and repetition. It’s the result of putting the work into the way you convey ideas. It’s forged from the discipline of craft. That Olympic ice skater you see gliding carelessly along the ice has bruised knees under their leggings.

Sentences Are Bricks to Build With

Sentences are the bricks of your story. What novices tend to do is heap points up on top of one another, and the result is an unstructured mess.

This is why shorter sentences are so essential to the beginning writer — they force you to construct your story instead of dumping ideas into a pile. Simple is hard, but it gets easier with practice.

Try forcing yourself to write more short sentences than you’re comfortable with. Scan through your writing to find commas that you can turn into full-stops. Doing so cuts sentences in two.

That’ll make you more eloquent as a writer, but also allow you to move sentences more easily in the editing process. If the pace isn’t right, you can lengthen some sentences to help the flow. You can do this with well-placed adjectives.

Novelists like Don Delilo and Cormac McCarthy often talk about how sentences look on the page — their visual appeal. They avoid ugly punctuation and will break the rules to do so. Avoid colons, parentheses, ellipses, and—for the love of God—avoid semicolons.

Full stops, a minimum of commas and the elegant em dash will do everything you need. A line break — a mere tap of the return key — does so much work. It lets readers pause to ponder.

If you keep your writing simple and clean, you make it not only visually appealing to your reader but also give it clarity that’s easy to edit.

That’s how you become more eloquent. That’s how you hold the reader’s attention.