Find your voice. Develop a routine. Study the classics.
Yeah, yeah. You've heard it all before.
That advice is fine, but it won't help you when you're staring at a paragraph that just doesn't work and you can't figure out why.
These writing tools give you a diagnostic system for your prose.
The tools move from the sentence level to the document level:
- Sentence-level techniques help you manage characters, actions, and the nouns that disguise them.
- Paragraph-level techniques help you build those sentences into passages that flow, cohere, and land with emphasis.
- Idea-level techniques help you structure entire pieces—motivating readers to care, guiding them through complex material, and applying one fractal principle that makes writing clearer at every scale.
Sentence-Level Techniques
Spotlight Your Main Characters ▶︎ Every sentence tells a story about someone. But if readers can't find that someone, they can't follow the story. Here's how to put your main characters center stage.
Actions ▶︎ The verb is the beating heart of your sentence. But when your key actions are buried in nouns instead of verbs, your text appears lifeless. Let your verbs carry the pulse.
Zombie Nouns: Know When to Break the Rule ▶︎ Most writing advice tells you to kill abstract nouns on sight. But sometimes you need them. Here's how to tell the difference between a nominalization that's cannibalizing an action and one that's doing real work.
Paragraph Level Techniques
Flow ▶︎ If your writing feels choppy—clear sentence by sentence but jarring over a paragraph—the problem is almost always the same: you're starting sentences with new information instead of old. One fix changes everything.
Coherence ▶︎ A passage can flow smoothly from sentence to sentence and still feel like it's about nothing. Coherence is what makes your sentences add up to a whole, and it depends on one thing most writers overlook: what you put in the subject position.
Emphasis ▶︎ There's a piece of real estate at the end of every sentence that determines how readers judge its clarity and its strength. Most writers waste it. Here's how to use it.
Idea Level Techniques
Problems that Make Readers Care ▶︎ Clear sentences and smooth paragraphs are worthless if your reader never makes it past the first line. Before you worry about how to say something, you need to give readers a reason to care—and that reason is always a problem.
The Big Picture: Give Readers the Map Before the Terrain ▶︎ Incoherence defeats everyone. Learn the four signals that help readers see how your sections fit into a whole.
Write in Fractals ▶︎ There is one structural principle that applies at every level of writing—sentences, paragraphs, sections, entire documents. Master it once and your writing gets clearer at every scale.