The most common writing advice I give my clients is to write shorter.
Ernest Hemingway took hours over a single sentence for a reason.
It’s a lot easier to write a short piece from scratch than to edit a long piece down and it starts with being focused on your goal and audience.
My good friend is a dentist in England. He photographed Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace against the regulations issued by the National Health Service for reopening after the Coronavirus, to make a point about linguistic sprawl. The picture (shown above) generated plenty of discussion. Meanwhile James Watson and Francis Crick summarized their discovery of DNA on a single piece of paper. Other common writing advice I often give:
—Replace acronyms and complex words with shorter normal words to avoid alienating people and looking insecure.
—Use the active voice to strengthen your sentences.
—Remove adjectives because nouns can stand on their own.
—Give the work time to prove in your mind by drafting four days before publication, and then editing it down each day.
On this subject I also recommend the books On Writing Well by William Zinnser, and On Writing—A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King.
I enjoy discussing this stuff in person and you can set up a 30-minute chat with me here. I’m still finding my feet as a consultant and my business grows most on referrals.
