✍️ Writing Clearly

What you’ll learn

1. The Work Has to Go SomewhereUnderstand clarity as a transfer of effort from reader to writer — the through-line of the whole course.Reading is work, and unclear writing does not destroy that work; it moves it onto the reader. Writing clearly means doing that work yourself, on the page, before you send it. Strunk's 'omit needless words' is a claim about function, not length: a clear sentence has no parts that do nothing, which is not the same as a short sentence.
2. Concrete Before AbstractLearn why concrete language is understood faster, and how to ground an abstraction instead of stacking more abstractions on it.Minds process things they can picture more readily than abstractions, so a concrete noun or example does work that definition alone cannot. The failure mode is the abstraction stack, where each vague term is explained with another vague term. The fix is not to ban abstraction — it is to anchor each abstraction to something the reader can see, then let the abstraction do its job.
3. Put the Action in the VerbIdentify nominalisations — actions frozen into nouns — and restore them to verbs, the single highest-yield edit in English prose.English lets you turn almost any verb into a noun ('decide' becomes 'the making of a decision'), and each time you do, the sentence needs filler verbs and prepositions to reassemble itself. Restoring the action to the verb usually cuts a third of the words while making the sentence more precise. The exception is real: a nominalisation is right when the action itself is the subject you are discussing.
4. Who Did What to WhomLearn the actor–action principle, and learn when the passive voice is the right choice rather than a fault.Readers understand a sentence fastest when its grammatical subject is the real actor and its verb is the real action. The passive voice is not a grammatical error and not always a fault — it is a tool for shifting focus, and it is the right choice when the actor is unknown, irrelevant, or genuinely less important than the thing acted upon. It becomes a problem when it is used to hide an actor who matters.
5. The Shape of a SentenceUse the stress position — old information first, new information last — to control emphasis and make sentences connect.A sentence has a weak beginning and a strong end; whatever lands last is what the reader remembers and carries forward. Putting familiar information first and new information in that stress position both emphasises the right thing and stitches sentences to one another. Sentence length is not the variable that matters — the placement of the new idea is.
6. Cut the Throat-ClearingRecognise and delete the filler that accumulates at the front of sentences — and distinguish it from hedging that is doing real work.Drafts collect throat-clearing: phrases that let the writer get moving but tell the reader nothing. The test is deletion — if removing the phrase changes no meaning, it was warm-up, not writing. The important exception is that some hedges are load-bearing: in careful writing, 'probably' or 'in most cases' can be the most honest word in the sentence, and cutting it makes the writing crisper and false.
7. Clarity at the Scale of a DocumentApply the same actor–action and old-new logic at document level: structure, ordering, and topic sentences.Every sentence-level move in this course has a document-level twin: the reader still needs to know who is acting, what is old, and what is new — only now the units are paragraphs and sections. Most unclear documents are not badly written sentence by sentence; they are ordered for the writer's convenience, following the sequence in which the writer discovered things rather than the sequence a reader needs.
8. Jargon and the Curse of KnowledgeDiagnose why experts write badly — the curse of knowledge — and decide when jargon serves the reader and when it excludes them.Jargon is not inherently bad: among people who share it, a technical term is the most concise and precise option available. It fails when the writer misjudges the audience, which is usually not arrogance but the curse of knowledge — the difficulty of reconstructing what it was like not to know something. Because you cannot introspect your way out of that bias, the reliable fixes are external: name a specific reader, or test on a real one.
9. Revision Is the JobSeparate drafting from editing, and run a concrete revision pass that applies every move in the course.Clear prose is almost never written; it is rewritten. Drafting and editing are opposed mental tasks — one generates, the other judges — and doing them at once produces slow, timid writing. A revision pass is a sequence of specific questions, largest first, and the read-aloud test remains the cheapest instrument for catching what the eye forgives.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style (1918)
• Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace
• Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (2014)
• George Gopen & Judith Swan, 'The Science of Scientific Writing', American Scientist 78 (1990)
• Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle
• Richard A. Lanham, Revising Prose
• Geoffrey K. Pullum, 'Fear and Loathing of the English Passive', Language & Communication 37 (2014)
• Elizabeth Newton, 'The Rocky Road from Actions to Intentions' (Stanford, 1990)

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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