Writing Well

Clear Writing is Clear Thinking

Though “rhetoric” began as the art of speaking to groups out loud, it has long also included writing as well. Though many of the principles we’ve discussed with speaking apply to writing, there are also some differences worth highlighting. For one, writing tends to handle detailed, complex material better than speaking. For another, writing tends to allow for greater polish (and for that polish to be appreciated). Also, with writing, you can’t “read” your audience live and make adjustments – once you put it out there, that’s what folks will read, for better or worse. Below, we’ll cover some ways to cope with and take advantage of these differences.

In a world where AI can crank out entire books, what’s the value in writing for yourself? Besides the benefits of communicating things in your own unique voice, writing things out is not only a great way to share your thoughts, but also an invaluable way to shape your thoughts. Often, a vague, insubstantial thought only becomes clear when you hammer it into sentences and paragraphs. Good writing is often a process of discovery as much as it is revealing an already found insight to others. Without writing out your thoughts, they are likely to be shallow, muddled, and unhelpful to you or others.

Though it is a shared feature with speaking, its worth bringing up again the weight of knowing your audience and your goal when it comes to writing. Knowing your audience allows you to share what will be most relevant to them, adjust your tone to what they will find engaging, and perhaps even more importantly, to leave out what they don’t care about. Knowing your own goal helps you to craft arguments and select evidence, to emphasize what’s most important, and address potential criticisms or counterarguments. As with speaking, these two elements interact in sometimes complex ways. An argument that might be rock solid with one audience might go right over the heads of another. A tone that is endearingly fresh to one audience might be unpolished or even rude to another. If you have started a business, your goal is likely to be different speaking to potential investors versus speaking to potential customers. So, take some time to consider to whom you are speaking and what it is you hope to accomplish – do you want to change their minds? Do you want to make them feel something? Or do you want to get them to do something?

Lastly, before we get into the finer points of “how to write well,” I’d like to point out that “writing” is not just the act of sitting down at your laptop and hammering out some words – it’s a process. If you have a friend who tells you he is “writing a book,” he doesn’t likely mean that all day, everyday he is sitting at his desk putting words into a word processor. Instead, it’s a fluid interaction of research, taking notes, reflection, writing, editing, and more. As such, what we’ve covered on learning is especially relevant here: while there is joy in learning for its own sake, usually we are learning to some end. If you are going to share your thoughts in writing, you have to have thoughts worth sharing, which means you need to learn, reflect, and organize your thoughts. Writing is the distillation of this process – often, a good test of whether you really understand something is whether you can explain it to someone else, and writing is one of the best ways to put your knowledge to that test.

Below, we’ll cover how to use structure to put your piece of writing together and help your audience understand how it all fits, how to match your style, tone and word choice to your audience and goal, the benefits of editing (and how to do it), and how to incorporate writing into your life as a regular practice.

The Importance of Structure

Though we touched on the importance of structure when we discussed speaking well, it is potentially even more important when writing. In speaking, you can get away with a certain amount of redundancy and filler, but in writing, you want to trim as much of that as possible, and a clear structure can help you do that. I should point out that some people do better starting with structure, and others do better by starting with something less orderly and re-arranging it. You likely already know what works better for you, but in case not, give it a try both ways: if you have something you’re going to write, sit down and plan out an outline ahead of time and pay attention to whether it feels helpful or constraining. On your next writing project, just start typing away, getting any thoughts out that come to mind, and after a while, go back and start re-arranging and organizing things. One of these approaches is likely to feel much more natural and helpful to you – that’s the one you want. Whether you organize up front or somewhere in the process, you want your final product to have a coherent, rational structure. If you’re not sure how to do that, read on.

Use The Five Paragraph Essay as a Baseline

As mentioned back in speaking, our go-to for structure is the venerable “Five Paragraph Essay.” If middle school English is a little fuzzy, here’s a reminder. You start with a paragraph that introduces your main point or argument (your “thesis”). You expand on it and provide arguments and evidence in favor of it in your “body paragraphs” (classically, three, but don’t feel locked into this number). Finally, you go back over your points and tie them together in a conclusion.

This may feel overly simple, but it’s been the default approach for nearly 3,000 years because it works. It originated with the speakers of Ancient Greece, was carried through the middle ages into the Renaissance, and is still taught today. It is very Renaissance. Folks are better able to take in and remember information when it has some point, when it means something. By laying out your argument first (whether you reveal where you come down on it or not), you make all of your evidence and sub-arguments immediately relevant and memorable. By recapitulating at the end, you solidify what you’ve said in the minds of your audience.

Clearly State your Main Idea in the Introduction

Your introduction orients the reader on what you’ll be discussing and where you’re going with it. Often, it is helpful to come right out and state your conclusion right at the beginning, as this intensifies the effect of giving your arguments and evidence a meaning to relate to. Also, for busy readers that trust you, they might read your first paragraph, go “yep, makes sense to me,” and then happily go about their days. The main caution here is with audiences that are very knowledgeable about your subject matter, especially if it is technical in nature, or audiences predisposed to be hostile to you. Audiences knowledgeable on technical matters often like to have the full argument laid out with all the steps before getting to the conclusion – doing otherwise feels like “cheating” or being sloppy. Hostile audiences will ignore everything you have to say if you make it clear you’re coming to a conclusion they disagree with, but might at least hear you out if you wait until after presenting the evidence to reveal your conclusion. Whether you come right out with where you’re going or not, you want your introduction to make clear the “so what” of your piece – why am I reading this? If your reader doesn’t have a clear answer to that question by the end of the introduction, he’s much less likely to get through the rest.

Share Your Sub-Arguments and Evidence in Body Paragraphs

The five paragraph essay is so named for the introduction, conclusion, and three body paragraphs. The number three for body paragraphs is not set in stone, however. Some pieces might be better served by two, or four, or even more. As we discussed in Speaking Well, though, the number three has a particular rhetorical resonance, at least in Western culture (I suspect in others as well, but don’t know enough to say for sure). A single argument/piece of evidence feels like “the only thing that matters.” Two feel like a dichotomy or duality. Four or more feels like a random sampling from an even wider field. Three things, though, feel like a complete, coherent picture. As such, unless you have a specific reason otherwise, I recommend using three body paragraphs as your default.

So, however many you have, what goes in your body paragraphs? Each body paragraph should make an argument or present evidence that supports your main point. A body paragraph mirrors the overall structure of your essay in miniature: a topic sentence to introduce the paragraph, three to five sentences to lay out your argument or evidence, and a conclusion sentence to wrap it up and transition to the next paragraph. Again, as you get more comfortable writing, you won’t have to stick to the formula strictly, but it’s a helpful starting point for the kind of thing you should be including, and it helps you to avoid un-needed fluff or filler. Is a sentence making the argument of the paragraph more clear or convincing? If not, cut it.

Make Your Evidence MECE

When you present evidence, it can be helpful to put it to the MECE test. MECE (pronounced “Me-See”) stands for “Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive.” Let’s unpack that a bit. “Mutually Exclusive” means that you want to avoid being repetitive. If you share a piece of evidence in one paragraph, it shouldn’t show up again in another. “Collectively Exhaustive” means that everything that needs to be in your essay is there, you haven’t left out a key piece of evidence or failed to spell out the steps of your reasoning. MECE is an ideal, and you won’t necessarily be able to fully reach it – sometimes evidence needs to show up in two different places, and you can’t include literally everything relevant to your argument, as that could quickly spiral out of control. I’m reminded of Carl Sagan’s old joke: “We’re going to make an apple pie from scratch. Step one: the Big Bang.” His point was, “from scratch” taken to its logical conclusion would mean the creation of matter. But in the context of a recipe, that’s obviously ridiculous – no housewife wants to slog through a few billion years of cosmology to get to what she actually needs to do in the kitchen to prepare a delicious dessert for her family. So, “Collectively Exhaustive” needs to have added to it “for your audience and goal.” Have I touched on all the points my audience will care about? Have I made all the best arguments I can for achieving my goal? I should also note that it’s usually helpful to do this step when you’re working out your structure, rather than as part of writing out your actual prose.

Tie It All Together in the Conclusion

Once you get to your conclusion, you should not be making any new points or introducing any new evidence. If you have held off on revealing which way you come down on your main topic, this is the place to do it. For example, maybe in your introduction you said something like “we’ll be investigating whether Option A or Option B better serves our organization.” In your body paragraphs, you’ve presented the evidence for and against each option as completely and non-redundantly as possible. Now, in your conclusion, you can state “due to the factors discussed above, namely, affordability, scalability, and ease of adoption, I believe Option A will better serve us.” If you have already made your position clear (say, in your introduction you instead said “Below, I will show how Option A offers better afforability, scalability, and ease of adoption than Option B.”), it can still be helpful to restate where you’ve been and why your stance is supported. It may feel redundant to re-state what you just spent a whole essay laying out in detail, but going back over the ground you’ve covered in a summarized form supports the process of building meaning we started in the introduction. Telling your readers what you’re going to talk about, talking about it, and then reminding them of the most important bits of what you’ve said gives them a solid framework of not only what you said, but how it fits together and why it matters. If the goal of your piece is to motivate some action on the part of the reader, it is also a good idea to close with a “call to action” – explicitly tell them what you would like to do (“Therefore, please vote to approve Option A.”) Making an explicit call to action might feel unneeded (“I just spent five paragraphs extolling the virtues of Option A, of course I want them to vote for it!”) or even needy (especially if you are asking them to spend money), but people are much more likely to take action when they are asked flat out than when the desired action is left implied.

Make it Visual with a Pyramid

While working at McKinsey & Company, Barbara Minto adapted the classic five paragraph essay into a visual form known as the “Minto Pyramid,” described in her book The Pyramid Principle.While conceptually it is the same as a traditional outline, it has a few features that many folks find useful. First, some folks are more visual than verbal thinkers, and so boxes connected by lines will make more immediate sense than an outline full of words, Roman numerals, and numbers. Secondly, a pyramid allows you to get the whole structure of a piece of writing on a single page, allowing you to see which evidence supports which arguments, and how those arguments ladder up to your main point. Thirdly, this visual structure makes the level of analysis crystal clear – is this bit a piece of evidence, a sub-argument, or what? In an outline, you might have to flip back and forth to check, but in a pyramid, it’s instantly clear.

To put your structure into this form, put your main point/thesis into a box at the top in as concise a form as you can manage (ideally one sentence or less). Below this box, put one box for each of your arguments supporting the main point (the body paragraph topics from your five-paragraph format). Connect each of these boxes to the top box with a line. Finally, on the bottom layer, put a box for each piece of evidence you will use to support your arguments, and connect each of these to the argument it belongs to with a line. Each line indicates that the lower box connected answers “why?” or “how?” for the higher box it is connected to. Generally, the conclusion is not included in the pyramid, as it is only a restatement of what is already in it, but you might find it helpful to write it out at the bottom anyway.

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Use Words to Make your Structure Clear

Besides the raw content of your essay, the arguments and evidence, you’ll want to communicate the structure holding it all together. Structure is not only a tool to help you put together your piece, it is also helpful to your readers to better understand what you have to say. One way you can get your structure across is through the use of words and sentences that indicate where you are in your argument, when you’re moving from one topic to another, and how the current point relates back to things you’ve alredy said.

Roadmap Sentences Lay Out Where You’re Going

Perhaps the most important tool for conveying structure verbally is the “roadmap sentence.” This is a sentence, usually put near the end of your introduction, that tells the reader what you’re going to cover (you can see one for this post at the end of the first section). The reason it’s called a “roadmap” sentence is that it orients your reader to where he’ll be going as he reads along. It’s the link between your main point/thesis and the sub-arguments and evidence you’ll be presenting in the body of the essay. As we discussed about conclusions above, this might feel repetitive, or even like hand-holding for your audience, but in reality, it is giving them the buckets into which you’ll be pouring your arguments and evidence, and without those buckets, they might just flow away and get lost. It also allows your reader to make an initial assessment of whether your piece will be worth his time – do the lines of reasoning you propose to follow make sense to him? Are they new or interesting? Obviously, you believe that it will be worthwhile, but giving him the chance to decide for himself will somewhat paradoxically increase his engagement by giving him a chance to bail out and making it his choice not to (of course, that’s assuming that he does believe it will be worth his time, and if not, maybe that guy wasn’t your target audience after all).

Transition Words and Sentences Mark the Way as You Go

At the beginning and end of your paragraphs, you will often want to give some indication of where you came from and where you’re going, respectively. Within your paragraphs, you’ll want to link the sentences together so that they feel like a coherent whole. Breaking your essay into paragraphs and sections, and your paragraphs into sentences, is how you make the different bits distinct, but including transition words is how you show they’re still part of a unified whole.The goal is balance: you don’t want an essay that feels like one long, single, stream-of-consciousness thought, but you also don’t want one that feels like five entirely separate mini-essays. Words like “further,” “moreover,” “next,” “additionally,” and “also” show that the new thought is connected to the previous one. Sentences like “now that we’ve covered verbal structural cues, let’s talk about visual structural cues.” wrap up the section/paragraph just finished and point forward to the next. You don’t necessarily need such explicit transitions between every sentence or paragraph, but they’re yet another case of something where you might underestimate the usefulness.

Logical Connectives Highlight the Steps in Your Argument

One sub-category of transition words are those that show the progression of a logical argument. Words like “thus,” “therefore,” “hence,” and “so” are the most obvious ones, showing that you’ve reached a conclusion that depends on the steps just given. More complex phrases can also help along the way – things like “which shows,” “building on that,” “it follows that” and the like can be used to make more clear how two points relate than simply “next” or “further.” One species of this is the miniature version of a roadmap sentence. If you’re going to make a set number of points, or explain a sequence, it can be helpful to say so upfront: “my three pieces of evidence are the following,” or “next, I’ll cover the behaviors of the common cardinal through the four seasons.” Generally speaking, the more complex and multi-stepped your argument, the more you’ll want to make use of such connectors, whereas with simpler logical progressions, you might not need them to make the relationships clear.

Use Formatting to Make your Structure Clear

One of the benefits of writing over speaking is that in addition to verbal cues to make your structure clear, you can also use visual cues. While visuals like bold or italic can be used within a sentence for emphasis, I find the most value from visual cues in the ability to divide a piece of writing up into sections and to make the hierarchy of those sections clear through some combination of size, color, font, and typeface. Most word-processing options today have tools for this built right in and will even support defining a line of text as a header of a specific level, and then if you change the style of that header, all instances will be automatically updated. I’m a bit of a layout & design nerd, so I like to play around with these fiddly bits, but that’s somewhat outside the scope of the current discussion.

As it impacts the clarity and understandability of your writing, things like sections, headers, and bullet points serve to show your audience the logical structure you took the time to craft. Once again, the structure not only helps you know what to write, it helps your audience follow along and make sense. I recommend erring on the side of too many, rather than too few, sections with headers in any piece that is primarily meant to be informative or persuasive, as there, you gain more by increasing comprehension than you lose by breaking up the flow or not being able to use a more writerly style. You’ll want your headers to stand out clearly as headers, which again, can be accomplished through larger size, a different color, being bold or italic or underlined, or a different font. I generally recommend you pick no more than two of those at each level of header, as 1) it tends to look cleaner that way, and 2) that gives you more ways to distinguish between headers of different levels (if your top level (Header 1, or H1), second level (H2), and third level (H3) are all underlined, it’s both harder to tell them apart, and you have fewer options if you want to define H4). For most writing, you won’t need more than three, possibly four, levels of headers – this is not a hard and fast rule, but rather an indicator that your logical structure might be overly-articulated, or that you are trying to convey that structure too granularly to the reader.

The Use & Abuse of Bullet Points and Lists

Many folks who have gotten a starting position at a job that requires a lot of email end up getting the advice “use more bullet points.” Some managers even require it. I had one MBA student who turned in a two page memo that was required for class, but he had put a bullet point before every paragraph because his boss “only reads things in bullet points.” And this advice is generally pretty helpful! Many of us struggle to summarize our thoughts in concise form, and a bulleted list is a well-known format to encourage that summarization. On the other hand, the things that a bulleted list cuts out, like transitions and logical connectives, as we’ve seen above, can be very helpful to help the reader understand what you’re saying. Bulleted lists also “feel” very corporate, precisely because they are so ubiquitous in that setting, so if you want to avoid that association, you might minimize your use of bulleted lists. I like to use them when explicitly stating a summary, whether a preview up front, or a conclusion near the end, or when I am literally presenting a list of things (“according to Colin Woodard, the eleven American nations are as follows: [bullet points]”). I also make heavy use of bulleted (and indented) lists in outlining my writing, but those tend to get turned into prose before anyone else ever sees them.

Message Rather than Topic Headers

Most of us have the idea that headers should be as short as possible: “Introduction, Procedure, Findings, Conclusion.” This comes from the (true) fact that you want them to be easy to skim, to stand out from the paragraphs of prose they are meant to help define, and to continue our general preference for being concise. In order to achieve this brevity, we tend to make use of “topic headers,” like the examples given above. Topic headers tell you “the kind of thing” a section will be about, without telling you about the thing itself. You know that you’re going to be reading about a procedure, but you don’t know what it is. You know that you’re getting to the conclusion, but no idea which way it will lean. So, while topic headers are miles better than no headers, and there’s nothing wrong with them, they are leaving value on the table that can be gained with a shift of perspective and (usually) the willingness to use a few more words. We find that value by making use of message headers, instead. A message header doesn’t tell you the kind of thing, it tells you the thing itself, in as abbreviated a form as we can manage. Rather than saying “Procedure” as a topic header, we might instead say “Review of Literature, Comparison, Synthesis” for a compressed version of the procedure we followed to produce an academic paper. Message headers can even be complete sentences (you’ll notice several in this essay are imperative sentences like “Use Formatting to Make Your Structure Clear”). The best news is that if you miss topic headers, you can combine them: “Procedure: Review the Literature, Compare, Synthesize.”

Some folks that I’ve introduced to message headers find them a bit off-putting, at least at first. They don’t look or feel like “real” headers because they’re too long, too much like the prose in the paragraph under them. Some also bridle at “giving away” what’s in the paragraph with a spoiler of a header. These are understandable points of resistance, and some folks decide that message headers just aren’t for them. The reasons I recommend everyone at least try them out and get the hang of how to craft them before rejecting them are:

1. They greatly enhance the amount of meaning your header provides, which in turn strengthens its ability help the reader follow and understand your structure. Remember how above we talked about how people are able to incorporate information more readily when they have a framework of meaning to fit it into? Message headers make your framework more load-bearing.
2. They force you to summarize a section into only one or two lines and to be very clear on what the section is about and what’s most important in it. This can help you to realize things that are missing, stuff that belongs in other sections, and things that it might be better to cut – it’s a way to revisit your structure and what it’s doing for the piece with hindsight instead of the foresight you were using before you wrote the prose (oh, by the way, it’s often easier to use placeholder or topic headers while writing, and then go back and craft the message headers afterwards).
3. They raise the value of skimming your work. I realize that your first thought might be “but I don’t want my reader to skim, I want him to engage with it deeply,” and hey, fair enough, that’s what any writer wants. To this thought, though, I have two responses: first, as the author, all you can do is offer something to your reader, not force him to engage with it as you’d prefer, and secondly, that skimming can be a valuable supplement to engaging deeply with your piece. For the first, if your reader is only going to skim it, wouldn’t you rather he take more away? And also, it might be that he starts skimming, but interesting message headers pull him in to reading what’s under them. For the second, skimming before reading a work can help the reader to orient and get more out of it, and skimming afterward can be a helpful way to recall what was in it and/or to dive back in on key parts.

(Oh, hey, look, a natural instance of where I would (and did) use a bulleted/numbered list.)

Looking Ahead to Next Time

Well, despite my desire to be as concise as possible, there turned out to be rather a lot of good stuff to talk about, and I think this is a good place to take a breather before coming back for a part two. In the next post, we’ll discuss (some) considerations for style, tone, and word choice, the role and value of editing, and how to build writing into your life as a practice.