Effective Communication: Your Ultimate Writing Checklist
This article was last updated 02.29.2024.
I add principles as a come across them.
The following principles are not silver bullets. There may be situations where you decide to veer from the principles, but nonetheless I think it useful to know about them.
They represent things I have come across, and my goal is to make people (and myself) aware of common patterns in the way we write that often obscure the message or points in the text.
Principles
In the following you will read about what I think are good things to keep in mind to help you write more clearly:
- Arguments before claims.
- Show the action.
- Show who is acting.
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Arguments before the claims
Many business models will go extinct in the future. This is because GDPR and digital privacy matters more and more.
I would argue that immediately leaping upon the reader with a strong claim creates a split-second of skepticism.
In the american sitcom “Big Bang Theory” there is a beautiful moment where Sheldon Cooper is reading a scientific paper. Suddenly he shouts: “Why.. WHY!” — Then flips over the page and goes “Oh.. That’s why”.
By structuring the sentence such that the argument that backs up the claim comes before, it is more likely that the statement will be accepted by your readers.
Because GDPR and digital privacy matters more and more, many business models will go extinct in the future.
Show the action
Actions can be made into verbs. This may hide who is doing the action and can potentially make the sentence less readable.
Below is an example of a note that a company might send to one of its employees:
Unjustified omission of absence report is equated with absenteeism with possible termination of the employment relationship as a result.
Instead they could have written:
If you for no reason forget to call in sick, you risk being fired.
The previous example is difficult to read, because we are turning a lot of verbs (actions) into nouns (things).
We can call these words action nounsand they can end in:
-ment, -tion, -ence, -ery, but may have a lot of other endings.
Alice "committed" to it.
A "commitment" to it was made.
Bob helped "distribute" the items.
The "distribution" of items was aided by Bob.
Charles is "confident" that this "will work".
"Confidence" may be put in this "solution".
Diana "discovers" something.
A "discovery" is made.In addition to these we also have something called gerunds. These are verbs that are used as a noun and are formed by adding -ing.
Alice likes to "write" stories.
The "writing" of stories is something Alice likes to do.If we go back to the example in the beginning we see a heavy usage of these types of words. We can replace these:
Unjustified "omission" of absence report is equated
with "absenteeism" with "possible termination"
of the employment relationship as a result.
If you "omit" your absence report, this is equated
with "not showing up" and "could terminate"
the employment relationship.Going further, we may also substitute some of the nouns with verbs that are saying the same thing:
If you omit your "absence report", this is equated
with not showing up and could terminate
the "employment relationship".
If you do not "report absence", this is equated
with not showing up and "you could be fired".Lastly, we could replace less known words with more used counterparts:
If you do not "report absence", this is "equated"
with not showing up and you could be fired.
If you do not "call in sick", this is "the same as"
not showing up, and you could be fired.Show who is acting
One might say that this is the best approach.
Where I come from, Denmark, many people default to these types of general pronouns (one) when speaking or writing. I call this the curse of the 3. person general pronoun.
Languages has a lot of different pronouns to chose from. In english we may dub the word onea third person general pronoun. It is third person because it refers to someone or something other than the speaker/writer (first person) or the listener/reader (second person). But unlike he, she, it, they, them, it is general in the way that it can really be used to refer to anything. Other examples of this are e.g. “Anyone”, “Everyone”, “Nobody”, or “Somebody”.
These words convey generalizations. They abstract and they avoid the need to specify a particular individual. Because of this it is often used in formal writing, such as academic papers, to maintain a neutral and impersonal tone.
The danger is that just because you hide who is doing something, doesn’t mean that they are still not doing that thing! Consider sentences like:“It is possible to argue that…”, or: “One may infer from this that….”. This is a typical way of writing. I think the reason is that many people avoid specifying the person because it may serve as an obvious point of attack.
If you say: “I would argue..”, or “Other academics have argued that…” , suddenly you have to face up to the questions of what other academics have argued this? Or why should I care about what you argue?
Side note: The attentive reader may have noticed that I began the last paragraph with the words “If you say”. Here I seem to actually be using you as a general pronoun. There is also the “inclusive we” (if we say “I would argue”) which may be used to refer to both the reader and writer and possibly others. A type of weird inclusive general pronoun!
As a writer you have to do more work to justify these pronouns. But it is important to know that the changes are purely semantic! For this reason I think it is helpful (when one writes that one does something) to always consider what is the underlying thing that is embedded in the general pronoun.
Sometimes you don’t even see the pronoun at all. The following is an example from a Wikipedia did-you-know text block:
The hall of worship of Okunoin holds more than 10,000 perpetually lit lanterns, some of which are said to have been burning for more than 900 years.
Reading the referenced article and looking at the source, what we may infer from this is this:
The hall of worhip of Okunoin holds more than 10,000 perpetually lit lanterns, two of which the website lonlyplanet.com states have been burning for more than 900 years.
This may not sound as credible, but it more clearly communicates what is actually going on. If you want to make it sound credible you should put in the work and state: “two of which most of the words historians believe to have been burning for more than 900 years…”.
Recap
I think these are useful things to be aware of. They are not really principles, in the sense that they can and should be broken all the time. But being aware of them, and choosing to break them rather then accidentally breaking them may help you communicate things more clearly. This is my hope at least!
Thanks for reading! I hope you found this useful. Feel free to hit me up if you don’t agree with the principles or things I wrote here. Or — if you have feedback, even just the postive nice kind — heh, you are also more than welcome in the comments. Cheers!
