School Writing vs. Real Life Writing

My kids end up listening to me extoling the value of clear writing on a regular basis and the conversation frequently takes a turn into how “we can’t do this at school.”

They’re not wrong. Our educational system typically rewards verbosity and vocabulary while page-minimums train us to say less with more.

This widely-circulated meme says it all (11 times):

In my experience working with individuals to improve their writing, more years of education make these habits more ingrained.

What to do?

Unraveling these habits doesn’t happen overnight, after all, you spent a long time learning them, but here are two suggestions to start with:

1. Ask someone who is not a subject-matter expert in your topic to underline everything they don’t understand or are tempted to skip over because it’s confusing.

2. Scour your writing for flabby phrases such as:

• In order to

• In a timely manner

• At the current time

• Developing a plan to

• In a situation when

• (Whatever your pet filler-phrase may be!)

Doing these two things will immediately lift your writing closer to clarity.

What's stopping you?

We've been trained to write in an academic or "smart" way, so we hesitate to simplify and streamline because we might sound stupid.

Take heart.

Focus groups typically prefer simple writing over complicated text (as do judges). Furthermore, studies show that overly jargony and technical articles are cited less, so they're not reaching the audience they could. And if we're honest with ourselves, who really prefers a dense piece of writing we have to struggle to understand?

If you're not sure, try it both ways and ask a few readers which one they give an A+.