10 tips to simplify your messages in 2024
Try some of these quick ideas for making messages easier for more people to understand. By David Walker.
Simplicity matters, in writing and all other forms of communication. That means short sentences, familiar words, active voice, specifics, clean syntax. If people can read and understand what we are writing effortlessly, they are more likely to keep reading.
One US writing coach, Bill Birchard, has argued in the Harvard Business Review that there's neurological evidence for this. Verbal simplicity, says Birchard, increases something called "processing fluency" in the brain. And people have learnt to trust simpler explanations more.
So here are ten ways to simplify:
Convince yourself that your ideas desperately need clear communication
Complex ideas have an unusual characteristic, one that should worry anyone in the business of communicating them. Compared to most of the ideas we see, complex ideas are hard to understand. That's especially true when they're new.
And if they're already hard to understand, we should be desperate to avoid using language that makes readers stop concentrating on them. Paul Graham makes this point well: "The harder the ideas you're talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way."
Make sure you understand what you want to say
Paul Graham heads YCombinator, the early-stage startup funder that backed Reddit, AirBnB, DropBox and many more. He also writes brilliantly about the act of writing.
Perhaps my favorite quote from Graham is this: “Good writing is an illusion: what people call good writing is actually good thinking, and of course good thinkers are rare.”
In my experience, this is profoundly true. If you're a serviceable writer struggling to simplify your prose, chances are that your struggles spring at least partly from the shortcomings of your own understanding. Once you work through what you really think (and what you don't know, which can be even more important), then you should be more easily able to simplify your material,.
Omit needless words (without going too far)
This is the enduringly famous rule 13 from William Strunk and E.B. White's classic The Elements Of Style. As they wrote:
"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."
This is one of the easier rules to start applying. A good editor can work their way through a document, tightening as they go. Clients are often startled by how much they can lift an article's impact simply by cutting the pieces that don't add any value.
But take care: sometimes words are performing important tasks that are not immediately obvious. A good editor will only cut after they have checked that the words chosen for removal really are unnecessary.
Don't kid yourself with fancy words
This rule is an important elaboration on Strunk and White's famous command above. Paul Graham argues that "complex sentences and fancy words" do something even worse than losing an audience. They "give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are". One benefit of a good edit is that it can clarify what are the strongest and weakest elements of an argument.
Fancy words often take the emotional power out of what you're saying. Most of the time, you don't want that. Of course, occasionally you do – so here's the comedian George Carlin to explain how to remove all the emotional impact from the paralysing fear that overcomes some soldiers after repeated shelling:
Listen to how experts talk to each other
Most experts are capable of conversing about their chosen topic in quite simple language. They don't kid each other with complex sentences, in part because it seems a lot like lying to the other person's face – and experts can usually spot the lie. As Paul Graham puts it:
"You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch. They use different words, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary. And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak."
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Hoa Loranger, a vice-president at usability consultancy Nielsen Norman Group, makes the same point: even highly educated readers crave succinct information that is easy to scan.
Write more like you talk
People tend to understand the rythyms of spoken language better than those of written language. So when it doubt, we should generally make our writing sound more like our speech – a cleaned-up and even polished version of our speech, but speech nevertheless.
This is harder than it sounds, because most people instinctively use a much more formal mode when they write. That's a habit many of us learned in school or university, and now we need to unlearn it.
Phone your uncle
Or your aunt. Then read them your short statement and ask them to explain it back to you. And if they can't explain it back, keep working on simplifying it.
Why your uncle, or aunt? Because your mum and dad so heavily influenced your communication style. They are now too likely to understand what you've written, even if it has problems for a broader audience. Your uncles won't be so used to your style – but he may have grown used to putting up with the idiosyncracies of his sister's crazy kid.
Write a pretend tweet
Here's an alternative to phoning relatives: pretend to tweet the message. Few things clarify your message more than choosing what to say in just 280 characters.
When you have one tweet written, you can start to think about what your second and third tweets would be.
The important things with both of these techniques is this: we are too buried in our ideas to evaluate how we're expressing it. In particular, we often see complexities, where new readers will want simplicity. Most people will at best take one thing away from what you write. A few people will take two or three things. So we simplify.
Work harder when it's maths
The "write like you talk" rule applies even more strongly when our writing contains maths. The written formal language of mathematics presumes that people are motivated to follow it carefully. But readers almost never behave this way in real life. So when we write about maths, we should take extra care to explain how the numbers are changing, and the effect that this has. In front of non-mathematical audiences, numbers almost never speak for themselves.
Rein in choices
The Hick-Hyman Law is named after two psychologists who in 1952 discovered a consistent rule: users who are bombarded with choices take more time to figure out what they should do. Don't give your audience work that they don’t want. Take every opportunity to sensibly limit the choices your audience has to make. (MORE)
Bonus: Read Paul Graham
Paul Graham writes better than almost anyone else on the planet on the topic of writing about ideas. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Graham has thought more usefully about this topic than almost anyone else, and that his writing is just a powerful side-effect of that thinking. That's why Graham is quoted more than anyone else in this article.
His collected essays are at paulgraham.com. Among his best:
Once you start looking for people with good ideas about communicating ideas, you may be struck by how few of them exist. It's a puzzle.
Coda: How rework works
The original title for this page was "15 tips for simplifying your message".
When we had the first eight, we decided we didn't need to wait for the next seven before releasing it. So it became "8 tips for simplifying your message".
Shorter is almost always better. So it became "8 tips to simplify your message".
Then we added an obvious extra rule ("omit needless words") to get "9 tips to simplify your message".
Evidence that the current year adds to a page's Google ranking led us to make it "9 tips to simplify your message in 2024". (This year name is actually programmed to update each New Year's day.)
And now we have 10 tips, because we found another good one ("rein in choices").
In many cases, this is how online editing should go.