How not to write: Lessons from editing
In my job at a health systems consulting firm, it can be tough to edit the academia-styled, technical writing of the public health industry. Often, I struggle through 50-word sentences written entirely in passive voice. The ideas tucked behind the lines are usually brilliant, but it’s my job to ensure sure readers can understand them.
Editing has taught me how not to write and how to make good writing better. And that’s pretty valuable.
Some lessons I’ve learned:
Harness verbs. Verbs make people pay attention. Take these lines, for example, from Cheryl Strayed’s Wild as she describes her hiking boot plunging off a cliff: “…catapulting into the air when my enormous backpack toppled onto it, then skittering across the gravelly trail and flying over the edge. It bounced off a rocky outcropping…” (emphasis my own).
Keep it short & simple. Write like you’re talking to a friend. Don’t try to impress us with showing how many words you can cram into a single sentence. It shouldn’t take someone ten tries to figure out your point because they’ve gotten lost in the pile of words.
Delete filler words. In the global health world, it’s the norm to write sentences like, “we aim to support countries to strengthen their health systems” instead of “we support countries to strengthen their health systems” or simply “we strengthen countries’ health systems.”
Create cadence. Break up longer sentences with shorter ones. Read your writing out loud to fine tune its rhythm.
Story arcs aren’t just for fiction. That technical report for a client? It should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. There should be an obvious problem, a compelling tackling of it, and a satisfying resolution (or at least recommendations for a resolution). And yes, there should be characters.
Break up those paragraphs. Because who really wants to stare down a massive block of text? Our attention spans are short. Make it easy on our eyes to quickly skim and figure out if it’s something we want to spend time *actually* reading. When it’s easier to read, it’s easier to engage with.
If you use passive voice, be intentional about it. Otherwise, stick to active. Today I edited a sentence that read, “dialogue is facilitated through policy briefs.” It’s much clearer to write “policy briefs facilitate dialogue.” Another sentence from today: “health systems will be leveraged.” For that, the reader needs to know who is doing the doing. It should be “[person/institution] will leverage health systems.”
Snappy headlines. I regularly edit headlines for blogs, proposals, and reports that are 15+ words long. Not only is that not great for SEO and link previews, it makes readers’ eyes glaze. See point #3. Try to make your headlines answer the “so what?” or “why should I care?” questions. If you can, show don’t tell to get your main point across.
Get rid of the gerund. Don’t write “we are implementing a project to [insert description]” when you can write “we implement a project to [insert description].” People LOVE overusing gerunds.
Clean up the acronyms. There’s a lot of jargon in every industry. But just because you assume your audience will know the acronyms doesn’t mean they will. And if you hope that once you introduce a new acronym, people will remember it later on in the text, you’re doing them a disservice. Also, I follow the New York Times’s style of not capitalizing acronyms that are pronounced like words (e.g., Covid, not COVID). Yes, I care about that sort of thing ;-)