How can I improve the readability of my writing?
April 20, 2015 9:04 AM   Subscribe

I think I write in a confusing manner. Folks seem to have a hard time wading through my sentences and paragraphs. Maybe it's because I use peculiar words. Maybe I phrase things awkwardly. Maybe I just don't understand how to properly structure a sentence. I don't know. Do you have any advice about how to write in a way that's easy to read and understand?

I also suspect that the way I write is just kind of boring, which makes it difficult to read regardless of how clear and well-structured it might be. So, I guess tips on how to make my writing more interesting would be welcome too.
posted by sam_harms to Writing & Language (25 answers total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
When revising, read your writing aloud and see how it sounds.
posted by gemutlichkeit at 9:09 AM on April 20, 2015 [13 favorites]


Well, it would be really helpful to see a writing sample if you're willing to post one. 300 words or so would be very useful.

As for generic tips, writing and reading skills are connected. If you're not a big reader, try to read one thing (a chapter of a book, or a news article, or an online posting, etc.) every day and think about which sentences are easy to understand, and which are difficult to understand. Which pieces flow well, and which don't.

On preview, reading aloud is incredibly helpful.
posted by schroedingersgirl at 9:11 AM on April 20, 2015 [4 favorites]


"Folks seems to have a hard time wading through my paragraphs" seems to be at odds with a description of your writing as "clear and well-structured." Strunk & White are good on paragraph coherence and unity.

What's the context for your writing? Who is your audience?
posted by monkeymonkey at 9:12 AM on April 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


So I looked through some previous AskMe answers of yours as this question was comprehensible.

The biggest recurring issue I saw was multiple comma splices creating large, ungainly sentences.

Sometimes, you avoided comma splices by using linking words, but the number of clauses still made the sentence ungainly.

Try to look at how many clauses you have in a sentence. You should be able to read a normal, everyday sentence aloud in one breath (pausing where appropriate for commas, colons, dashes and semi-colons). Normal volume, normal speed, one breath.

Additionally, each sentence should only really deal with one idea. Save explanations or theories for the next sentence, generally.

That said, a writing sample, especially one that you heard was confusing, would help. Even with the details blanked out. Are we talking about business writing or casual writing? Fiction or non-fiction?
posted by flibbertigibbet at 9:18 AM on April 20, 2015 [7 favorites]


Take what you wrote and analyze each sentence for clarity starting at the last sentence and working backwards.

Sometimes you get in such a rythym when writing that re-reading or even reading aloud to yourself can not catch all the awkward turns of phrase because your brain might be going "Yea! Yea! Yea!" just re-confirming the ideas you already got out onto the paper. Working your sentences from last to first get your brain out of your personal flow and feedback loop so you can see better if you have any area for improvement.
posted by WeekendJen at 9:21 AM on April 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


I highly recommend Joseph Williams' book Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. I find it much more helpful than Strunk and White, because it it helps you understand the qualities that make prose clear or unclear, and then shows you how to achieve those qualities in your own writing.

One thing I will say is that it takes practice. It's hard to diagnose problems in your own writing, and you need to just keep writing and keep on applying the principles from the book until it becomes second nature. There's no magic solution.
posted by number9dream at 9:30 AM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]




Response by poster: So I looked through some previous AskMe answers of yours as this question was comprehensible.

This is what I figured people would do. I'm avoiding posting any other writing sample though, because I want to focus on general tips that everyone would do well to follow, instead of specific criticisms of my own writing. The tips given so far are actually pretty useful.
posted by sam_harms at 10:02 AM on April 20, 2015


I'm sort of nthing flibbertigibbet. When I write an extended piece, I just let it go at first and get my thoughts down. Then I go back and break long sentences into shorter multiple sentences. I think it keeps you from losing your reader by dragging the thought on and on and then losing the point.
posted by Billiken at 10:08 AM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Brevity is clarity.

To expand on that a little: It's good exercise to practice writing the shortest sentence that will hold your point. Not out of a slavish devotion to brevity, where you're amputating sentences right and left, but because we often bury our points under extra words. We think we are clarifying, specifying, but we are drawing the reader's eye further and further from what we needed to say.

So: Practice short sentences. Really short. Entirely too short, to the point that they sound almost mechanical and fragmentary. Remember, this is just practice. Fragments are okay. Because if we separate them out, it's easier to see which phrases (and words) obscure the point.

Another idea: Pretend you are writing poetry. Each phrase gets its own line. Short sentences fit on their own line. Complicated, complex, compound sentences and the phrases in them get broken up. Then look down at your poem. It's a list of items. You can cross some out; some will be meaningful, some will be padding, some will be unfortunate, some will be keepers. Keep the good ones, delete the extra line spaces, and you have a better sentence than the one you started with.

The good news is, all the padding in the sentence is boring. The extra words, the commas, the things that are mostly filler while the eye waits to get to the good stuff. Take out all the filler, and let your reader get to the good stuff. It may not be deathless prose. Short sentences bore too. Depends on the topic, depends on the reader. But an engaged reader who easily finds your point has found more use and probably less boredom than the reader you've hidden your point from.
posted by mittens at 10:33 AM on April 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


Considering flibbertigibbet's advice above, you might find something like the Flesch-Kincaid Readability score useful. There are many online versions you can paste text into, or Microsoft Word has a version of it built-in that runs when you run spell-check. If your main writing problem is an excess of structural complexity, it might really help you.

Generally speaking, the lower the grade level score, the easier your text will be to comprehend. In attempting to lower your readability score, you'll find you have to use shorter, more common words rather than big/fancy words. You'll also need to break long sentences into shorter, simpler sentences. It's good practice. I use this because I do a lot of writing for public audiences, with state-mandated readability levels.

However, if your writing is difficult to understand because you're not expressing yourself directly enough, or if your writing is just disorganized and sloppy, it won't do you any good at all. If that's the problem, you might be able to improve by reducing your paragraphs to something like this:

"This is what I want the outcome of this message to be. This is my first supporting point. This is my second supporting point. This is my third supporting point, if I need a third. This is a restatement of what I want the outcome of this message to be."

Putting it into practice looks something like this:

"Jane, I'd like us to start meeting once a week to touch base on how our work is going. It would help me keep our objectives top of mind. I also think it would be useful for us to share our progress regularly. If you agree, let's set up a touch-base meeting once a week. Thanks, sam_harms."

In a longer message with multiple paragraphs, your paragraphs should follow the same pattern. Paragraph 1, state your message/thesis. Paragraphs 2-4 each covers one supporting point. Paragraph 5 restates your message or thesis as a conclusion.

It's a bit ridiculous, I know, but if organization is the problem, following a ridiculous simple pattern can help. The more practice you get doing that, the better a foundation you'll have for exciting flourishes like semicolons and clauses and whatnot.
posted by kythuen at 10:42 AM on April 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


Any time I find I've written a particularly complex sentence, I assume it is because I am as confused as the reader will be. So I ask myself "What am I really trying to say here?"
posted by DrGail at 10:42 AM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Here is how Ben Franklin taught himself to be an excellent writer:

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With that view, I took some of the papers, and making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by for a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. I then compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults and corrected them.

If there's a contemporary writer you admire and would like to learn from, you might try the Ben Franklin technique with some of their work.
posted by yankeefog at 12:04 PM on April 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


Read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."
posted by entropone at 12:18 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Revising Prose is a nifty book by Richard Lanham about how to simplify and tighten on a second pass what you've written.
posted by bertran at 12:24 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Ask yourself this question: What are you most trying to communicate? If necessary, ask yourself that question repeatedly until it says what you want it to say.

When writing, the initial draft is what you are thinking. It is your internal view of the thing. This first draft can be so bad that it amounts to a derail for your audience. After you have kind of thrown that out there, read through it and see if it really conveys the most important information as succinctly as possible, as early as possible. If not, start editing. (It probably doesn't.)

It has helped me to do things like participate on Twitter and post FPPs on MetaFilter. Twitter only allows 140 characters. If you really want to say anything meaty, you need to think hard about what to put in there. When posting on the blue, you need to think about the headline, which is only 72 characters, the short intro "before the fold" and the longer part "after the fold." Both the headline and the short intro need to say the most important things and it needs to be said well and succinctly. So trying to meet those standards is helpful.

The nice thing about something like twitter and forum posts is that they are interactive mediums. So if you post some article to the blue because you thought "Oh, neat, those are cool butterflies!" and everyone replies with "Why do you hate moths so much?" or "Oh, neat, (blathers on about totally unrelated topic that has nothing to do with butterflies)!", welp, that tells you something about what you actually communicated and can help you figure out how to do it better next time.

Another thing that helps is making a draft and leaving it for a bit. When you come back to it later, you should have a clearer idea what you want to communicate and you can see what you really wrote and whether or not it said what you wanted to say. Most often, it did not and now is the time to write something that has some hope of actually being good communication.

Last, I will suggest that image-rich writing can be a good way to powerfully convey ideas. You need to be clear what you are trying to communicate, but most humans are visual creatures. So writing that is rich in visual imagery and metaphors can have a lot of bang for the buck.
posted by Michele in California at 12:38 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: A lot of this advice boils down to thinking about what you want to say, and then being more intentional about how you say it. I think that's a real issue I have. It's a really long story, but I do have some hang-ups about allowing myself to think too closely about the content and structure of what I'm writing. This is all great advice here--really, I favorited every last comment--but in the end I think my real issue is that I'm afraid to think about what I'm writing too closely. That's a whole other AskMeFi question, so I won't go into it now, but if anyone has any more advice I'd love to hear it.
posted by sam_harms at 12:53 PM on April 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


Just a thought from a wordy nerd....

Anything really well written is most likely version 10, 20, or 40 from the original and a lot older than it looks.

I can write fast and poorly, and often do, but if I want to write well, I edit and edit and edit and revise, obsess, wait a week, and do that again.

Sometimes I take two completely different approaches to a topic and do both. As often as not, I stick them in a folder and they never see the light of day to the outside world, having served their purpose of letting me tell myself what I think of something.

One time in a million, I budget myself a page or ten and wind up creating a single sentence masterpiece, which I use.

The thing is... if you are after communication as opposed to some other goal, you're talking to an audience which will remember nothing. Certainly nothing long. If you conceal the message in a forest of words, they may never see the one, central thing that you want to get across.

Less is often more... ("I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I ran out of time", is a quote attributed to Lincoln by some, but probably really isn't his. Doesn't matter. The theme is the thing.)
posted by FauxScot at 1:07 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


I do have some hang-ups about allowing myself to think too closely about the content and structure of what I'm writing.

I pulled my sons out of school when they were 8 and 11 years old to homeschool them. The first year, we homeschooled through a charter school. Both of my sons were more than a year behind in writing even though they both read well above grade level. My oldest in particular really hated writing and really had big problems (including output difficulties, that he still sometimes struggles with).

One of the things he was required to do that first year (suggested by the charter school) was to keep a journal. He had to write every day. He had to write a minimum of three sentences. The sentences had to have a minimum of three words. It was okay if he wrote "I hate writing. I hate writing. I hate writing." as his three sentences. He did, in fact, do that many times before he began really writing original stuff in his journal. His writing did get better.

So I will suggest you keep a journal. Make yourself write. Give yourself a minimum amount you must write regularly, but set the bar really low on all other measures of your writing. Just write.

As you do it more regularly and see some progress, you can start actively working more on specific issues. But given your description of the issue, I suggest you just make yourself write regularly until simply writing isn't some big deal. After you get over that hump, it gets a lot easier to use it as a tool to communicate.

Best of luck.
posted by Michele in California at 2:48 PM on April 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


A plain English course is a very good investment.

The big lesson of plain English is that if you want to say something, just say it.

Don't work up to saying it, don't set out the background before saying it, just say it.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:03 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


I highly recommend Joseph Williams' book Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.

nthing this. This is one of a few writing books that's a mile above all the rest. You can get an older edition for cheap.
posted by zeek321 at 3:34 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


A writer I like has talked about how The Ten Percent Solution Has improved his work. It may or may not apply to your writing, he is referencing fiction, but here is how he describes it:

"That’s where I take 125,000 words of manuscript and go through it sentence by sentence, justifying the existence of every “that,” “or,” and adverb. (“He slammed his hands on the desk, angrily.” Oh, that was angry? Good job, past [Author], thanks for telling me!)"

"Also, I keep discovering more useless words I don’t usually need. New additions are:

all
seem (most times “seem to” can be replaced profitably by “are”)
start (most times “started to” can be replaced profitably by “did”)
going (most times “was going to” can be replaced profitably by “will” or “would”)
began (most times “began to” can be replaced profitably by “did”)
as if (finds your bad metaphors – “like” is already on the list)
could
strange (I have a terrible habit of saying “he felt a strange compulsion” instead of describing the compulsion)"

And seconding watching out for parenthetical asides and the like. I have a tendency to use a lot of them as well, and it definitely leads to run-on sentences which can be needlessly complicated. If you find yourself using a lot of commas, reread, and figure out what you really need, and what can be removed without changing the meaning of what you're trying to get across.
posted by catatethebird at 5:35 PM on April 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader's Perspective has a lot of concrete tips. It's aimed at improving readability, especially in academic and scientific writing, but I think of it even when writing e-mail.
posted by MrBobinski at 6:23 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


I highly recommend Joseph Williams' book Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.

There are several different versions, try to get the one with the exercises.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:01 PM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


My favorite short text on the subject: How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily by Michael Covington

Good writing is partly a matter of character. Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader. I’m not going to demand that you put up with my quirks (bad spelling, bad organization, sloppiness). I’m going to package the information so that it enters your heads as easily as possible.

posted by Freen at 2:36 PM on April 21, 2015 [2 favorites]


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