What the hell am I talking about?
Image: in the public domain
A common piece of advice is to write the way you speak, the idea being that you will then be ‘freed up’ to express yourself without worrying about that intimidating blank page (or screen) before you.
This may be useful to get you started, but if you send whatever you’ve written in the same spirit, look out.
If you’ve ever recorded a conversation and played it back, you’ll notice one striking thing: it contains hardly any complete sentences.
Why? Because the target of your communication is giving you immediate feedback while you are conveying the message. And most of that feedback is non-verbal. When you’re trying to make a point to somebody and they start nodding, there’s no need to finish the sentence, is there? They’ve already got the message.
It can be a tremendous obstacle, even for experienced writers, to get over the fact that they will not be present as an advocate for their writing when it reaches the recipient(s). It will be an orphan that has to speak for itself. So those words you’ve chosen had better make sense without you around to interpret them. They’re going to mean just what they say, and that’s all.
So how do you ‘edit’ yourself effectively? The passage of time is very helpful, but nobody has enough of that anymore. Still, you’ll be amazed at how much nonsense you can discover in your own writing when you look at it again even a day later. Reading aloud helps too.
But it will come as little surprise to you when I say that the best solution of all is to have a pair of disinterested, editorial eyes give your report, CV, dissertation or threatening letter the once-over before you put it before your cold and critical target audience.
