Tricks to write clearer

I’ve written a lot. And I’ve regretted most of it. So much of what I’ve said was too long and boring. Most of it was probably obvious to readers anyway. A lot of the rest was either redundant or implied. If anyone read it, they probably skimmed it a lot.

So I’ve come up with a few writing rules for myself. Rules aren’t bad; complete freedom is paralyzing. The rules themselves don’t matter. Having them does.

I used these rules when making Gen Z Bible Stories, a tiktok with funny translations of bible stories, which had 400k followers, so apparently it helped.

I also used them when writing The Gospel by Gen Z, which sold about 14,000 copies in 2024 on amazon and about 4,000 more through my own website. It seems these rules helped make it a big hit.

The main rule is to write within a small width. Often, this is the width of a site’s comment box. When I wrote my tiktoks, I wrote them in notepad, and resized the window to something like 80 chars.

Each line must be a complete, contained thought, even if it’s only one clause in a longer sentence. This rule helps me to get straight to the point, and prevents me from using long-winded phrases, or longer words when shorter would be as clear.

Often times, this results in perfect alignment. This isn’t a requirement, just a little “reward”. Consider the paragraph at the beginning of this. This is how it looked to me when I wrote it:

I've written a lot. And I've regretted most of it.
So much of what I've said was too long and boring.
Most of it was probably obvious to readers anyway.
A lot of the rest was either redundant or implied.
If anyone read it, they probably skimmed it a lot.

Another rule is to keep paragraphs very short, not more than 3 or 5 lines each, give or take. If it’s longer, maybe it should be split up. This sometimes forces me to leave out lines which probably wouldn’t have been read anyway.

These rules force me to use short and clear words. Far too much writing is grossly self-congratulatory. I read maybe 10% of any page I come across online.

There’s a famous quote from maybe Pascal or someone, “sorry for having written you such a length letter, but I didn’t have time to make it any shorter.” If I’m not willing to spend time helping my readers, then why would I expect readers to give me theirs?

Anyway, I hope this helps.

Oh also a commenter reminded me of a rule I forgot: Never ever ever try to satisfy the types of people who get hung up on the stupidest of stupid things. This will save you tons of valuable time and energy.