After working with thousands of students over the years, I've distilled clear writing into 9 simple techniques.
These techniques aren't grounded in my own personal style or taste, and they don't appeal to arbitrary rules.
They're grounded in reader psychology.
If we know how readers read, then we can shape our prose to match. We know, for instance, that readers read from left to right. And we know that it's easier to understand a story when old, familiar information comes before new, unfamiliar information. Therefore, it makes sense to locate familiar, backwards-linking information at the start of the sentence, and new, forward-linking information at the end of the sentence.
That's just one example of how we can ground our writing practices in reader psychology. For the full list of 9 reader-focused writing techniques, check out this video.
When you're done, check out the full list of writing tools here:
William Fitzpatrick