Writing for Readers

Write it the way you would explain it out loud to a colleague. Simple, short, common words. The reader is not a beginner, and is also not reading closely: they are skimming, on a phone, half-deciding whether to keep going.

Assume the first draft is twice as long as it needs to be. The rewrite every example below comes from went 350 words to 155 with no fact lost. Cutting half is the normal result, not an aggressive one.

Nine tells make prose read as machine-written within two sentences. Each one below has a name, the rejected text, and the approved replacement. All examples are the real before and after of one section, "Connections multiply with every parallel session".

1. The aphorism pair

A short claim followed immediately by its mirror image.