Nib of the Week

Rule #13 in Strunk & White still holds: “Make the paragraph the unit of composition.”  Don’t think of your writing as a collection of words or even sentences, but paragraphs. Each paragraph should present One Complete Thought — one idea, one step in the story you’re telling or the argument you’re making. Paragraphs signal all this simply by how they look. The line break and indentation tell the reader, We’re done with the previous idea and moving on to a new one. Take advantage of those visual cues as you draft and revise your work. Open paragraphs with some kind of topic sentence to tee up what follows. Close them with a good kicker that polishes off the point or springboards readers into the next paragraph. You can even outline your piece this way — plan one paragraph for each main point in your outline. Readers read in paragraphs, so writers should write in paragraphs too. Until next week… keep writing.

When writing first drafts, writers are usually still working out what we think. One result is duplicate sentences. We unconsciously state the same thought in different ways, often back to back. Just like the two previous sentences! Or consider these examples: This bill will only raise taxes on people making more than $1 million per year. It won’t raise taxes on anyone making less than seven figures. The hotel was farther from the city than we expected. We were surprised by how long it took to get downtown. This kind of repetition is natural in conversation. But good writing doesn’t ask readers to pay for the same real estate twice. When editing your writing, be on the lookout for twin sentences. Pick the one that sounds best, or take the best from each to form a better one, and delete the rest. Until next week… keep writing!

The hardest part of writing about public policy is making substantive arguments without getting lost in the weeds. Disagreements over policy minutiae in a speech or op-ed have reduced more than one congressional office to a Hobbesian state of nature. So here are two tips for finding the right balance between wonkiness and accessibility. Tip #1 : Ask yourself who your audience is. If they are experts, then write wonky. If they’re laymen, make the language more accessible. If the answer is somewhere in between, Tip #2 is that when you have to write for both, write to both. Think of your audience as two particular people: Dr. X, a world-renowned expert on your topic, and Mrs. Y, a smart, educated, and curious layman. Set your tone, choose your words and emphases, and present your argument and evidence in such a way that it won’t bore Dr. X or bewilder Mrs. Y. Provide enough context so non-experts can follow along, but not so much that experts will feel their intelligence insulted. If you can connect with both Dr. X and Mrs. Y, you’ll connect with everyone in between them too. Until next week… keep writing!

One of the most powerful writing tips anyone can learn is to never just write . Always write to an audience . Before you write word one, before you even outline your composition, clarify in your mind, as specifically as you can, who your reader is. Is it your teacher? Your boss, coworker, or subordinate? A friend, sibling, or parent? A romantic prospect? A business, nonprofit, or government agency? If your audience is a group of people, what kind of people? Are they religious? Educated? Wealthy or poor? Idealistic or cynical? Young or old? Male or female? Conservative or progressive? Knowledgeable or unfamiliar with the topic? If you were talking with these people, you would adjust your tone, word choice, and sentence structure based on who they are. Do the same with your writing. If you want to connect with your audience, you have to know who they are and how they think. Take the time to figure that out before you start writing. It will make your drafting smoother and your drafts better, guaranteed. Until next week… keep writing!

The biggest challenge of editing our own writing is that we know what we meant to say. When we read our own drafts, our brains fill in gaps and “correct” mistakes, tricking us into seeing what we intended to write rather than what’s really on the page. One way to overcome this is to proofread backwards . If you’re working on draft three or four and are starting to get too familiar with the text to see it clearly, try reading the sentences in reverse order. Start with the last sentence, then read the next-to-last, and so on until you reach your intro. Proofing backwards breaks the logical flow of the writing, so you can consider each sentence in isolation. You’ll still need to edit forward for structure, coherence, and flow, of course. But once the forest is in good shape and you’re down to the trees or the leaves — typos, extra words, stray punctuation — proofing backwards is a great way to look at your own work with fresh eyes. Until next week… keep writing!