Threads of short, easy-to-read posts with practical ideas to make your writing more focused and the time you spend writing more productive.
A Practical Plan to Get Your Draft Done (and Stress Out About It Less)
Three Tips for Making Your Nonfiction Writing Easier to Read
A Down and Dirty Guide to Revising Your Draft (Coming soon)
In these last posts, I’ve given some tips for you to make sure that your writing is easy for readers to follow.
Making sure your reader doesn’t get lost easily is also a main focus when you revise your manuscript.
And when you do it well, it’s something that makes a manuscript especially noticeable when it arrives in an editor’s hands.
Happy writing.
If I can be of help as you write, use the contact form to get in touch.
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Subheads should be simple and direct. Avoid the temptation to use tricky wording.
Think of signs on the highway. They have to be short and direct because when we are driving by, we only have a split second to read them.
They just give us the information we need: Next Exit 12 Miles. Rest Area 3 Miles.
Your subheads should be like those highway signs: short, informative, and reassuring.
Note that some style guides (APA for example) have guidelines for subheads (use of capital letters, underlining, etc.)
One of the easiest techniques to use to make your writing easy to follow is to use subheads in your text.
Subheads are words or phrases that stand on a line by themselves at the beginning of a section and tell the reader the main idea you will present in that section.
If you’ve ever read a textbook, you’ve seen subheads. Take a look at almost any scholarly article or nonfiction book and you’ll see them.
Any document that goes beyond a page or two will be easier to follow if it contains subheads.
Besides numbers, there are many kinds of transition words that you can use.
Time markers can sometimes work well: next, then, subsequently, later.
Other useful markers: for example, on the other hand, despite this fact.
One great source of examples of transition markers is this page from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL.) Though originally designed for university students, this website is a really valuable resource for all writers who want to learn more about how the writing process works.
In the example in the last post, I use the simplest transition words you can have: first, second, and third.
People reading that paragraph can have no doubt about why I’m including these three sentences. I started by telling them that the report would note “three major achievements.” Then I began my description of each one with a transition word: first, second, third.
Some writers object to using these transition words: “It sounds too mechanical.”
My experience as a reader and an editor tells me it’s better to sound a bit mechanical than to lose the reader.
I’ve marked the transition words in my made-up copy about the art museum:
The Pan-American Art Museum notes three important achievements made during the last fiscal year. First, our new executive director has come on board and brings with her a deep background in Incan culture. Second, the number of visits increased substantially over last year. And third, our endowment has grown beyond our projections, thanks in large part to a generous grant from the South American Cultural Foundation.
Transition words are markers you put in prominent places in your writing to make sure that your readers don’t take a wrong turn and get lost.
This is especially true when you are making a turn in your writing. Like when you are moving form one main point to the next. Or when you are stopping to give an example. Or when you are going into more detail about an idea.
In other words, every time you start a new paragraph.
And just about every time you start a new sentence.
If you’ve ever had someone follow you in their car to a destination that you know and they do not, you’ve had experience with what editors call “transitions.”
As you drive to the location and your friend follows in their car, you need to put on your turn signals a bit earlier than you ordinarily would.
You need to change lanes more slowly.
You need to check in the rearview mirror to make sure that the person is still following you.
When you write, your readers don’t know where you are taking them. So you need to constantly make sure they are following you. How?
In the last post, I used a simple roadmap to organize the sample copy I included.
In preparing to write the copy, I made a choice to mention one idea first, another second, and the final idea third.
Then I started the writing by telling my readers what pieces of information I was going to cover and the order in which I would get to them.
Giving your readers a preview or a roadmap compensates for the fact that you already know what you’re going to be saying and your readers do not.
And it keeps your readers from asking the one question an author should never want to hear: “Why are you telling me this?”
When you are presenting any information that has more than one part to it, tell your readers up front what the parts are and in what order you will treat them.
Here’s an example I’ve made up that does this:
The Pan-American Art Museum notes three important achievements made during the last fiscal year. First, our new executive director has come on board and brings with her a deep background in Incan culture. Second, the number of visits has increased substantially over last year. And third, our endowment has grown beyond our projections, thanks in large part to a generous grant from the South American Cultural Foundation.
Next: Telling them where to go
When they come across writing that is hard to follow, most people’s natural reaction is to stop reading.
And it’s easier than ever for them do to that with a world of electronic distractions at their fingertips even while they are reading what you wrote.
If you’ve ever had assembly instructions that were difficult to understand, you probably threw them down and either got help or went on without them.
Even people who have to read what you give them–editors, colleagues, co-workers and supervisors in your organization–will be tempted to start skimming when they cannot easily follow what you are trying to tell them.
Or they’ll get distracted. And focus on the frustration they felt instead of your ideas.
That’s a thought that should strike fear into all writers. The last thing you want is for your readers to walk away or wish they could have.
In these posts, I’m going to give three quick tips to help make your academic and professional writing easy to follow.
Before we go on, think of a time you had to read something that was hard to follow.
Maybe an assignment in school or college or a document at work or instructions on how to assemble something.
Remember the frustration you felt when you realized you weren’t grasping what the author wanted you to see?
More importantly, try to recall what your reaction was.
Have you ever been stuck with a writing project and given it to a friend or colleague to read?
When you do that, you were trying to look at your writing through the eyes of your readers.
This need to look out for readers is also what keeps most professional editors in business. An editor provides an experienced second set of eyes for what you have written.
Besides hiring an editor, there are concrete steps you can take to lead your readers through your points in a way that makes them comfortable and not frustrated.
When you do acaemic and professional writing, you are an expert in the topic your are writing about. Some academic writers know more about their topic than almost everyone else on the planet.
But when you write, you have to think about how your writing will strike people who have no prior knowledge of what you are writing about.
And this is true even when you are writing for experts your field. Because even they do not know what you are going to say.
So how do you write in way that keeps your reader always in your mind?
Your most important job as a writer is to make sure that your reader never gets lost.
In my last post, I deliberately let you get lost so you could see what it feels like.
That was pretty easy to do by bringing up material that didn’t follow from the first idea I discussed in the paragraph.
But whenever you write something that’s more than a few lines long, you can confuse your readers without intending to. It happens even to experienced writers, because of a weird dynamic in how writing works.
Effective writing stays focused on one topic at a time. Do you know that Incan pottery never showed the human form? It used a variety of geometric patterns to create artefacts that had both practical and ceremonial uses.
The paragraph you just read should confuse you.
When you read it, you have no idea how it fits together. How does the idea that effective writing takes up one topic at a time connect to the information about Incan pottery?
If you were confused—and maybe a little frustrated–when you read the first paragraph, remember that feeling.
It can be an important tool in making your writing better.
My goal in offering this series of Quick Tips is to give you some specific things to do to get a good draft for your project and to overcome the stress that many people feel when they have to do a major writing project.
Really, all these tips come down to one thing. Set yourself up to have success every time you work on your project.
First, by planning your writing project along the lines I’ve suggested in these posts.
Second, use the ideas I’ve talked about to make progress each time you work on your draft. That can come from big things like finishing a chapter. Or figuring out how to break down a section that is too long into more manageable chunks. Or from little things like finally finding the right wording to explain an important detail.
However it comes, figure out a way to move forward a bit each time you work.
And that progress is the best antidote I know to the stress of writing.
If I can be of help as you work, use the contact form to get in touch.
Happy writing.
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