Short sentences. Plain words.

Know what each sentence says, what it does not say, and what it implies.

Read what the words literally say, not what you meant them to say. Grammar, syntax and connotation do not care about your intentions. The reader only has the sentence.

Let each sentence say its one thing, then end it.

A sentence that tries to carry three ideas carries none of them well. Trust the period. When a sentence is overcrowded, split it.

Write short sentences until you can feel the difference a long one makes.

Short sentences force clarity and leave nowhere to hide. Complex, intelligent things can be said in short sentences. Short is relative to the length you habitually write.

Build a long sentence only from strong short ones, and keep it as clear as a short one.

A good long sentence is a chain of short sentences joined with care. If you cannot break it back into short sentences, it is not under control.

Make every sentence a complete thought that stands on its own feet.

A sentence that only makes sense by leaning on its neighbor is propping something up. Sentences can listen to each other without clinging to each other. Each should be worth reading on its own.

Never let a sentence talk about what it is saying.

Say the thing. Commentary on your own statement is padding with a frown on it.

Reject the sentence that offers itself up ready-made.

The first sentence that arrives usually arrives because you have read it a thousand times. It has the rhythm and vocabulary of published prose and says nothing anyone needed you to say. Ease is not evidence of quality.

Know the whole sentence before you write it down.

Typing three words and waiting for the rest locks in a shape before you have chosen one. Make the sentence in your head, try versions of it, then commit.

When a sentence goes wrong, ask what you are trying to say and write the answer.

The answer is usually plainer and better than the sentence it replaces. Then adjust it until you can imagine saying it out loud to someone.

Pursue clarity, not a style or a voice.

Style is what is left when you have said exactly what you noticed as clearly as you can. Protecting "my voice" is usually an excuse to keep bad sentences.

Use the real name of a thing, not the category it belongs to.

Specific nouns carry pictures. Category words carry nothing. Learn the names the world already has.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Long Latinate words dress up a vague claim to look precise. A short word commits you to a meaning.

Turn -ion nouns and noun phrases back into verbs.

Nominalizations freeze the action into an object and leave a weak verb to push it around. Find the hidden verb and use it.

Cut intensifiers and adverbs the verb already contains.

Words added for emphasis weaken the claim. If the verb is right, the adverb is redundant. If the noun is right, it needs no grand adjective.

Use the fewest words that say it, and do not make explicit what is already implied.

Every word is optional until it proves it is needed. Removing one often makes the sentence stronger.

Look up the words you feel sure of, not only the ones you doubt.

Meanings guessed from context drift. You are responsible for every nuance of a word you use, including its history.

Do not dodge "is" with a fancier verb that means the same thing.

Swapping "is" for "resides", "sits" or "serves as" adds pretension, not energy. Either find a real action or let "is" stand.

Prefer everyday words to jargon, foreign phrases and scientific borrowings.

Jargon tells the reader you belong to a club. Plain words tell them what happened. Resist the vocabulary that comes bundled with your subject.

When prose stiffens, use contractions and shorter words.

Formal is not the same as serious. If a paragraph sounds like a memo, rewrite it as a letter to a friend, then keep what survives.

Use metaphors rarely, briefly, and only when they are literally accurate.

Read every metaphor literally before keeping it. Extend none across several sentences. Never mix two images in one breath.

Make the subject an actor capable of doing what the verb says.

Abstract subjects doing human things make prose foggy. Put a person or a concrete thing in the subject slot and the verb wakes up.

Keep people in the sentence; do not let abstractions replace them.

Writing about what people do is clearer when the people are in it.

Keep the subject close to its verb.

Every word between subject and verb is a word the reader holds in suspense. Move long interruptions to the front or the end, or make them their own sentence.

Use the active voice; never use the passive to hide who acted.

The passive removes the actor. Sometimes that is the point, which is exactly why readers distrust it.

Use one plain verb instead of a weak verb plus a noun.

These phrases pad a sentence with extra syllables and save you the work of choosing a verb. Find the verb hiding inside.

Replace phrase-prepositions with plain ones.

A four-word connector where one word would do is the commonest form of padding.

Cut "There is" and "It is" openings and start with the real subject.

These openings postpone the subject and spend a clause saying nothing. Check how your sentences begin; habitual openers show up fast.

Do not bolt clauses on with "with" or "as".

"With" pretends to be a conjunction and "as" forces a false simultaneity. Both let you avoid deciding how two facts relate. Make two sentences or a real conjunction.

Replace inert verbs with verbs that show an action.

When most of your verbs are forms of "to be" or connective verbs like "relate", "involve" or "present", the life of the sentence has to come from somewhere else. Usually it does not.

Put every word and phrase next to what it modifies.

An opening phrase must modify the subject that follows it. A pronoun points at the nearest noun, so check that it is the one you meant. Misplaced "only" changes the meaning.

Give transitive verbs their objects.

"This enables" and "this allows" with nothing after them leave the reader to guess what was enabled.

Use the simple past; do not stack pasts on pasts.

Layered tenses ("had had", "would have been") make the reader do arithmetic about time.

Say the plain positive instead of denying a negative.

The not-un- construction looks careful and says less. Stacked negatives scramble the meaning, so count them.

Do not coin -ize, de- and -ization words to avoid a plain phrase.

Invented abstractions sound technical and hide what actually changes hands.

Do not dress a list up as a range with "from ... to".

A range implies a scale between two ends. Most of these lists have no scale. Just list the things.

Never use a figure of speech you are used to seeing in print.

A worn metaphor has lost its picture. Writers use it to skip inventing a phrase, and readers skip over it. Either make a fresh image you can see or say it plainly.

Cut any phrase whose words cluster together on their own.

If the second half of a phrase arrives automatically, it is a cliché, even if nobody calls it one. Irony and scare quotes do not rescue it.

Choose words for their meaning; do not glue together ready-made strips.

Long stock phrases arrive with their own rhythm and think for you. They are easy to write and they half-conceal your meaning even from yourself.

Do not prop up the end of a sentence with a grand commonplace.

A booming stock phrase at the end saves the sentence from anticlimax by adding nothing.

Do not use words the reader cannot check against anything.

Some words have no agreed definition, so writers use them to sound approving or disapproving without committing to a claim. Say what you can point to instead.

Name ugly things plainly.

Euphemism lets a writer describe something terrible without calling up a picture of it. If you would not say it plainly, ask why.

Do not dress up a judgment in scientific or heroic vocabulary.

Grand words give an air of precision or grandeur to an ordinary or biased claim. They inflate events and hide opinions.

Keep concrete images; do not translate them into abstractions.

Abstract prose is easier to write and impossible to see. The plain version is almost always shorter.

Cut the connective words that simulate logic.

These words claim a logical relation instead of making one clear. They steer the reader and borrow the authority of an academic essay. When the sentences are clear, the connection shows itself.

Write for a reader who is intelligent and reads every word literally.

The reader brings everything they know about reading and about life. Write for that reader and you stop overexplaining. Write clearly and they will follow you anywhere.

Leave room for the reader to complete the thought.

A sentence can say more than its words. Every word you cut makes room for implication. Leave some silence between sentences.

Show the thing, then stop; do not tell the reader what it means.

Over-narrating, over-describing and over-interpreting all say the same thing: I do not trust you to get it.

Never write a sentence whose only job is to connect two others.

Bridge sentences, previews and recaps exist because you fear the reader will get lost. Start the next paragraph with its first real sentence. Use transitions only for real turns.

Do not restate the previous sentence before adding to it.

Sentences that step on each other's heels make the reader walk the same ground twice.

State what you see; cut the hedges and apologies.

Authority comes from clear sentences, not credentials. Hedging every claim or belittling your own view asks the reader to discount you.

Do not imitate the voice of professors, journalists or experts.

Stiff, credential-signaling prose tries to overawe the reader. It reads as a costume. Hiding behind quoted sources works the same way.

Do not wink at the reader or write for applause.

Cleverness for its own sake, hyperbole and mock formality pull attention from the subject to the writer.

Say the obvious thing plainly; it may be news to the reader.

Straining to be original produces clever sentences that are not quite true. Accurate and clear beats clever.

Make every sentence deliver what its opening promises.

The start of a sentence sets an expectation about where it is going. Ambiguity breaks that promise, and readers always take the wrong reading.

Use "I" when it belongs; do not contort sentences to avoid it.

Dodging the first person creates passives and abstractions. Being coy with it is no better.

Start the piece with its first real sentence; skip the throat-clearing.

Generalizing openers delay the piece and sound like every other piece. The first sentence only has to make the reader want the second.

Do not write a hook; the reader does not need grabbing.

Clever, teasing openers advertise the piece instead of beginning it. Presence holds a reader longer than a trick does.

Do not make the first sentence summarize or frame the whole piece.

Audition many first sentences and pick the one that opens possibilities, not the one that feels safe.

Find the structure sentence by sentence instead of filling in an outline.

An outline assumes you know what you think before you have written it. Clarify the sentences first and the structure reveals itself. Genre templates are outlines by another name.

Do not save the best point for the end.

Withholding the strongest material for a big finish leaves the middle thin. Use it where it belongs. You will think of more.

Cut topic sentences and paragraphs that announce what is coming.

Previewing content is a promise to say it later. Say it now.

Stop when you are done; do not add a summarizing finale.

The ending you want is probably already written a few sentences back.

Do not default to telling things in the order they happened.

Chronology is a choice, usually a dull one. Order the piece by what matters, and break the flow of time once it starts to take over.

Use the one detail or quote you need, where you need it.

Do not present material in the clumps you gathered it in. Break notes, interviews and sources apart and give each fact a new neighborhood. Quote only the part that matters.

Persuade with clear sentences, not with the scaffolding of an argument.

Most prose "logic" is just proximity. A fragile house of premises and connectives collapses when one card slips. Write so clearly that the point looks self-evident.

Know why you are telling the reader this before you write it.

If you cannot answer, the reader will not be able to either.

Hunt for sameness in sentence length and structure, and break it.

Runs of same-shaped sentences put the reader to sleep. Choppiness is cured by variation, not by making sentences longer. When you repeat a shape, have a reason the reader can feel.

Do not let a pattern dictate the next sentence.

Parallel structures and contrasts are powerful once. As a habit they force weak words into slots and make prose sound like a speech.

Do not steer the reader with a contrast word at the start of a sentence.

Two plain sentences side by side make the contrast without announcing it.

Remove "but" and "however" when the reversal survives without them.

It usually does. When you need one, prefer "but" to "however".

Put the words that matter at the start or the end of the sentence.

The beginning and end of a sentence are its stressed positions. The middle is where words go to hide.

Use a short sentence as a harbinger, a reprise or a coda.

Next to longer sentences, a short one lands hard. Adjacent short sentences create friction.

Keep the last sentence from settling into a steady, predictable beat.

A crescendo the reader can hear coming sounds like a closing line from a speech.

Adjust each sentence until you can imagine saying it.

Spoken prose uses short, simple words, few clauses and a clear rhythm. It is not slang. If you would never say it to a person, rewrite it.

Revise toward brevity: remove words instead of adding them.

Treat every word as optional until it proves itself. Remove one, read the sentence again, and put it back only if the sentence stumbles. Try it even on "the".

Look for the better sentence hiding inside a bad one.

Often it is already there, under the padding. Delete first, then look.

Fix a broken sentence by rethinking it, not by rearranging its words.

Moving the same words around like a Rubik's Cube rarely fixes them. Ask what you are trying to say and start over.

Read your draft aloud and stop wherever your ear senses trouble.

The faint feeling that something is off is the best evidence you will get. Find its cause before moving on. Read plainly, without performing.

Put each sentence on its own line to see it.

Broken out, you see lengths, openings, repeated shapes and repeated words that a paragraph hides. Count the forms of "to be" and the -ion nouns.

Revise at the point of composition; do not leave placeholders to fix later.

A rough draft full of sentences you mean to fix becomes the structure you are stuck with.

Read your work as a reader would, not as its writer.

You know what you meant. The reader only has what you wrote. Read for the words, not through them.

Hunt down words you repeated by accident.

Deliberate repetition has a job. Accidental repetition is noise, and a shrinking vocabulary is a sign you are bored.

Do not judge whole sections; fix one sentence at a time.

"This is terrible" and "this is great" are both ways to stop looking. When stuck, fix the next sentence.

Revise toward brevity, directness, simplicity, clarity, rhythm, literalness, implication, variation and silence.

Remove words instead of adding them. Cut evasive phrasing. Watch for ambiguity. Leave some silence.

Use the sentences to find out what you think.

Making sentences and thinking are the same act. Let what you discover while writing change what you meant to write.

Write down what you actually noticed, not what you are supposed to notice.

If you noticed it, it matters. Nobody will authorize you to find it important; you have to do that yourself.

Attest to what you saw instead of trying to prove a case.

Writing witnesses. Say how things are as accurately as you can, and dare to say what is true.

Write only what you actually think, not what the audience expects.

Reciting a party line in its stock phrases turns the writer into a ventriloquist's dummy. Insincerity produces foggy prose.

Acknowledge what you do not know instead of hiding it.

Knowing the edge of your knowledge keeps the writing honest and the claims the right size.

Distrust sentences that came easily; flow is something the reader feels, not the writer.

Ease is not evidence of quality. Writing is hard, and the difficulty means you are paying attention. The reader will never know how hard the sentence was to make.

Read for how sentences are made, not only for what they mean.

Every sentence in good prose is the residue of decisions. Ask why this word, this shape, this rhythm. Never stop reading.