One Small Step

A writing goal a day keeps the editor away.

Greetings, all­ — and a warm welcome to the new subscribers who signed up after reading my article about how to write concisely in the Harvard Business Review. I’m glad you’re here, and I’d love to hear more about you: What do you write at work, and what questions do you have about writing?  Please feel free to share in the comments or to send me a quick email by replying to this newsletter directly.

This week’s Hack: This week, set one writing goal each day — but make it a small one.

Back when I first started teaching writing, I learned quickly that my students did their best work when they weren’t trying to take on too much at once. When someone gives you back a paper that’s covered with comments and suggestions, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. What should you prioritize? And how can you possibly fix everything all at once?

If you’re trying to improve your writing at work — whether you’d like to be clearer or more efficient (or both) –– you may run into a similar problem. It’s hard to know what to focus on, and you may not know where to start. Or you may just feel like you can’t do it. For this week’s Hack, I’m taking inspiration from the Couch to 5K program that gets people who usually don’t run at all to get off the couch and run a 5K in nine weeks. But my challenge does not require you to get off the couch! In fact, the couch may be the perfect place to sit while you try this week’s Hack: Instead of adding a new fitness goal each day, we’re going to add a small, manageable writing goal. If you’re up for the challenge, I’ve got five (small) goals for you to start with:

Day 1: Think about your audience.

Today, before you start writing anything, think about your audience. What do your readers already know? What do they need to know? Imagine that you’re about to board a plane for your destination. Are your readers there at the gate with you? If so, they may not need to hear how you got to the gate. If not, you may need to offer some background information about how you got to the airport. 

If you can keep in mind what your audience already knows, what they need to know, and what they don’t need to know, you will be able to make effective decisions about what information to keep and what to leave out of your document.

Day 2: Just write it down.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Does your writing process include too much time spent staring at the blank screen or scrolling through Twitter or Instagram? Today, keep yourself away from social media by keeping yourself busy writing…anything. Write a messy first draft without worrying about which ideas will end up in the final version. Just write it all down. (I’m a big fan of writing myself into that first draft with sentences like this: “In this section I need to make some kind of transition between the Couch to 5K and my main advice about small writing goals, but I can’t figure out what that should be so for now I am just going to write things about running and writing.”) Once you’ve got the words on the page, make a list of the points you’ve made and see if you can begin to imagine a structure for your document. When you’ve written down everything you can think of, look at the last thing you wrote: It may just be the best part.

Day 3: Look for overlapping sentences.

Today, see if you can cut any and all (see what I did there?) repetition from what you’re writing. Sometimes we make a point, but we're not sure it's clear — so we make the same point again in a slightly different way in the next sentence(s). If you do this often, you end up with a document that’s longer than it needs to be, and you water down your message. In other words, your document will be unnecessarily wordy and readers will have to work harder to understand your message. The main point is lost in a sea of repetition. Readers have to wade through extra words to find out what you really mean. Try keeping the best parts of those sentences and cutting the rest.

Day 4: Try temporary subheadings.

To structure a document logically, try temporary subheadings like this one:

THIS IS MY SECTION ABOUT SUBHEADINGS

These subheadings can be informal ("in this section, I'm talking about why I like waffles"; "in this section, I'm talking about how to serve waffles with ice cream"). Take them out when you're done — or not.

Day 5:  Cut 10 words from whatever you’re writing.

Photo by Matt Artz on Unsplash

Start with the usual suspects: basically, actually, literally, totally, essentially, practically, really, totally. You think you need these words...but do you? Literally ask yourself what the word is really, totally adding to your sentence. If the answer is “nothing,” then cut, cut, cut.

Congratulations! You’ve made it from the couch to the front door. Time to lace up your shoes. Let me know how it goes.