I know I’m not alone. Most people struggle to communicate well. Speaking has real-time feedback, enabling the speaker and listener to resolve confusion. Writing has fewer cues, lacking tone of voice and body language. Writing is often asynchronous and lacks direct and timely feedback. Writing is prone to creating confusion. Clear writing limits confusion.

We’re going to dive into a two-part series on how to write clearly. The first part relates to clear sentences. The next part will relate to clear thinking. The good news is clear writing (and clear speaking) is a learnable skill. I work on my writing skills every day, and I feel myself improving every day. Writing improvement is an iterative process with a compounding effect and benefits. You may feel you’re a failure every time you write. However, you will see dramatic differences when comparing your writing today with writing from months or years ago.

Writing clear sentences

I’m going to presume basic grammar knowledge. We’re not going to cover comma or colon usage. We’re going to focus on writing simply. Simple writing respects your audience. The easier something is to read, the more likely someone is to finish reading it and understand it. Simple writing is somehow anathema to education and perceived intelligence. Education trains people to be complex writers. In my schooling, my teachers praised long, compound, and complex grammatically correct sentences. Teachers praised advanced vocabulary (like “anathema”). I took my writing’s complexity as a signal of my intelligence. It’s taken years to unlearn this habit.

I like Paul Graham’s writings because he focuses on simplicity. He even recently wrote a piece titled Write Simply. We think about writing similarly. My favorite lines from his piece relate to sentence complexity:

“The main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated, or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy to me. It seems clumsy.”

Writing simply is hard. It requires training your mind. If your thoughts are long and convoluted, your writing will be as well. I invest in training my mind to write and think crisply. I’ve developed my own simple and clear style over fifteen years of deliberate practice by observing how others react to what I write and say. Here are my Six Tenants for Sentences.

1. Use shorter sentences

Always consider your audience. Why is your audience reading? It’s likely to get information or understand what they need to do. Longer sentences are mentally taxing. Long sentences make the reader want to stop reading. Long sentences make it harder to understand what the writer is trying to say.

What do you think is my average sentence length? To this point, it’s only 10 words. My writing may not be particularly beautiful, but it is clear. I’m not making you or my other readers work to understand my ideas.

Now, think about things you dread reading. I read many journal articles by education researchers. I dread it. I find it daunting, and I often find myself actively avoiding reading research. Most academic writing is overly complex and content-dense. I find myself engaged when reading clear academic writing. I am more prone to cite and use clear articles.

A general rule of thumb is to have fewer than 20 words in each sentence. The New York Times averages 15. It’s fine to go longer if the sentence remains clear, but you want to avoid having too many long sentences strung together. Vary your sentence length and have a long sentence (20 or more words) at most every 3 sentences. I try to average under 15 words per sentence. There are three strategies for shorter sentences:

• Avoid compound sentences. Compound sentences combine two related sentences with a conjunction (e.g., and, but, or, however). Compound sentences can improve flow, but I try to use them sparingly. I often find myself splitting compound sentences into two distinct sentences when revising.

• Remove prepositional phrases. Prepositional phrases modify verbs or nouns. I look at prepositional phrases like Mark Twain looked at adjectives. Mark said, “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” Prepositional phrases add additional meaning to writing. Yet, I often find the additional context many prepositional phrases add ends up being unnecessary within the context of the broader piece. I hunt unnecessary phrases when revising. If a lengthy phrase is necessary, I consider the overall sentence length and determine whether to form two sentences to cover the content.

• Break sentences into two. I seek out and destroy long sentences. My general rule of thumb is always to break up sentences that go onto three lines. A line is typically about 20 words, meaning sentences over 40 words should not exist. Breaking up sentences increases readability and clarity even if the overall word count is longer.

2. Use fewer sentences

Writing simply means writing concisely. Unnecessary paragraphs and sentences create confusion and diminish understanding. It’s difficult to be concise in a first draft. I make my writing concise when I’m revising by doing: 

• Eliminating unnecessary sentences. I often find entire sentences and even paragraphs I write that are unnecessary to make my point. These always seemed like a good idea when I wrote them. However, my writing’s purpose may have shifted, or the point became less valuable under closer examination. My strategy is to identify the purpose of my writing and the key points I want to make. Then, I evaluate each paragraph and sentence to determine its value. I eliminate anything that isn’t valuable.

• Identifying redundant sentences. I occasionally find sentences or paragraphs that make eerily similar points. These most frequently occur in close succession – e.g., in two consecutive sentences. I spot these and delete one or combine them if it creates a better overall sentence or paragraph.

• Combining sentences. Sometimes, a sentence or paragraph adds very little useful information – perhaps just a few words or a phrase. In these cases, I combine sentences to create a clearer and shorter product. Often, the eliminated sentence becomes merely an adjective or a prepositional phrase in the combined sentence.

3. Avoid long and strung-together prepositional phrases

There’s nothing I dislike more than a lengthy prepositional phrase. These decrease readability and make writing lose impact. I hold a particular hatred for long prepositional phrases used before a sentence and within a sentence’s middle, such as between a subject and verb. I believe this is lazy writing.

When you start a new sentence, do not start it with a long prepositional phrase. It makes the sentence less punchy. The reader is left confused about what the prepositional phrase describes until reading the subject or verb. The more unanswered questions your reader has in their mind, the less they’ll understand. You want to keep the reader thinking about content and not your sentence structures. Often, a sentence will work better by placing the prepositional phrase you intended for the sentence’s beginning at its end.

Prepositional phrases in the middle of sentences make reading difficult. Placing a prepositional phrase in the middle of a sentence by modifying a subject such as in this sentence creates confusion. The reader is looking for the action the subject takes, but the verb is more distant from the subject than is typical. A better path is to move the prepositional phrase to the sentence’s end to make reading easier, such as this sentence.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t use prepositional phrases before or in the middle of sentences. You need to do it intelligently. Keep the prepositional phrases short and make sure they’re required in that exact location to understand the writing’s meaning. Otherwise, either remove the prepositional phrase or put it at the sentence’s end.

4. Minimize the use of linking words 

Linking words improve flow by linking sentences together. Furthermore (a linking word), linking words can improve readability by helping readers understand connections. I view the use of linking words as a coverup for lazy writing. Sentences should naturally flow together without being explicitly linked. However (a linking word), I will use linking words to enhance clarity, such as to signal a coming contrast (e.g., however, yet, but) or a new thought (e.g., first, second). Yet (a linking word), I did not need to use furthermore or however in the previous sentences. My style removed the need for these linking words. Try to remove linking words from your writing, such as furthermore, thereafter, finally, and in addition. This will take some practice and time as you’ll find yourself rewriting sentences to improve natural flow.

5. Vary sentences

Varying sentence structure and length makes writing more engaging, meaning people will be more attentive to your thoughts and read further in your writing. If you’ve made it this far after 1,500 words, I’ve done a good job varying my sentences. 

I sometimes use the same subject for multiple sentences in a row for effect, but I change up my subjects, verbs, sentence style, and lengths frequently. Some sentences are meant to be jarring, keeping you on your toes. Others are short and punchy when I make a point I want you to remember or linger on. Others are longer and detail-packed. The key is to be intentional. I’ve learned to vary my sentences naturally while writing through deliberate practice and reading good authors. But, I also rigorously look for sentence variation opportunities when revising my writing.

6. Write in the active voice

Active voice is easier to read and more engaging. It follows a simple structure. There is a clear subject that performs the action stated by the verb. For example, “The person sang a song.” In this case, the person is the subject and performs the action of singing. Passive voice is more difficult to read and decreases the impact of your writing. The passive voice has a subject that receives the action stated by the verb. For example, “The song was sung by the person.” In this case, the subject, the person, is after the verb phrase, was sung.

It’s more difficult to understand passive voice because the subject is unclear until the person nearly completes reading the sentence. Placing the subject at the sentence’s beginning clarifies what the sentence is about from its beginning and decreases the distance between the subject and its action. As such, active voice is more concise and requires less thought from the reader.

A good strategy for spotting passive voice is to find the action (verb) in each sentence and who or what is performing the action (subject). Subjects after the verb typically signal passive voice and present an opportunity to improve clarity by changing it to active voice.

What to do now

You should develop a plan for implementing the Six Tenants for Sentences. The best way to improve is through deliberate practice (see my essay The best way to improve writing), including self-assessing and revising your writing. Self-assessment doesn’t just involve reading your writing for simplicity and clarity; it requires considering how your audience responds. The response, or lack thereof, is feedback that can help you continue to improve.

How you write clearly should also consider the stakes of your writing (see my essay How to write business communications). I rigorously apply the Six Tenants to high-stakes writing, where I spend significant time revising. For low-stakes writing, clarity matters, but your audience will be more forgiving, and confusion is more easily cleared up. I will prioritize short sentences and concise writing for low-stakes, but I spend less time varying my sentences, reducing prepositional phrases, and minimizing my linking words. 

Remember, improving your writing is an iterative process. Try to focus on self-assessing and revising your writing for clarity when you do high-stakes writing, such as to your boss, a customer, or the public. Over time, you’ll find yourself naturally improving your low-stakes writing with the people you interact with daily.

I expect to share the next part on clear thinking in the coming weeks. Make sure you subscribe to The Writing Times (if you have not done so already). Also, share this issue with your friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

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I discussed why writing matters in the workplace in my previous essay. Now, we’re going to discuss a general nine-step framework for your (and your team’s) written communications. The written communications we consider in this essay are commonplace writing through email, workplace messengers (e.g., Slack), and texting (e.g., WhatsApp, WeChat). We’re not considering business writing for documenting thoughts, such as memos, PowerPoints, proposals, and manuals. We will discuss these other forms of business writing in future essays.

The General Framework will soon be second nature, but at first, it may feel daunting and time-consuming. However, you’ll start seeing significant and compounding results. Your and your team’s writing will be clearer, significantly reducing confusion and misunderstanding. You’ll find yourself and your team sending fewer messages, receiving better responses, and getting things done faster and with higher quality.

The General Framework for Written Communications

Step 1: Identify your purpose

Why are you communicating? Answering this question is critical to writing a crisp communication or avoiding unnecessary communication. You may be communicating for any number of reasons, from confirming receipt of an email to scheduling a time to connect to updating someone on your work’s status to answering a question to adding your thoughts to an idea.

Step 2: Identify your goals

What are you hoping to accomplish? All communications should have a result. The result may be for your audience to understand information or your thoughts. The result may be to get one or more people to take an action. Having a good grasp of your intended result will naturally make your goals clearer to your audience.

Step 3: Identify the communication type

Are you initiating the conversation or contributing? Are you just delivering information, or do you need someone to take action? The answers to these questions frame the Four Types of Communications: Inform, Answer, Request, and Advance. Knowing your communication type is critical to your communication’s success by clearly identifying what should happen next (e.g., Is there an action to take?).

Inform: You initiate a conversation and provide information. You do not have actions to ask someone to complete. You do not expect a response. Common Inform communications include updates, newsletters (like this one), and announcements.

Answer: You reply to a request by contributing information. You don't have a subsequent action for the other person to take. The other person may act on your information, but you are done and don’t intend the conversation to continue. Common Answer communications include resolving a question or requested action, providing information or an idea, or acknowledging receipt.

Request: You initiate a conversation and need someone to take an action (i.e., do something that may or may not require a response to the communication). Requests can sometimes include information, but the message intends to get someone to take an action. The conversation is likely to continue. Common Request communications include selling or asking someone to do something or respond to a question.

Advance: You are contributing to a conversation. You advance the conversation to the next stage, meaning there is an action for someone else to take (or you will take later). The conversation is expected to continue. Common Advance communications include clarifying information, contributing to a thought or idea, acting that then requires another person to act, and reminding someone of something they need to do or accomplish.

Each of The 4 Communication Types has simple structures that apply to various subforms of each communication type. We’ll cover a generic communications structure in Step 5 and will cover other structures in future essays.

Step 4: Consider your audience

Anytime you send a communication, you need to consider your audience’s perspectives, motivations, and background knowledge. For their perspectives, do they already have an opinion or belief you need to consider? For their motivations, what do they care about or what makes them successful? For their background knowledge, what do they already know, and what do they need to know to successfully use the communication?

The thought you need to put into your audience’s perspectives, motivations, and background knowledge varies based on the “stakes” of the communication. The higher the stakes, the less forgiving your readers may be with mistakes or lack of clarity in your writing. Higher stakes communications can materially advance or hinder your career. The lower the stakes, the more forgiving your readers may be with your writing. Lower stakes communications may influence your reputation among your peers, reports, and colleagues, but each communication is less likely to have a material impact on your career. I like to determine the “stakes” by considering power dynamics and communication frequency.

After determining the stakes, you can better attend to your audience. You can think through how much the audience’s perspectives or motivations matter and if you need to consider them in your writing. You can more clearly identify what background information you’ll likely need to include. You can also determine how much time and effort you need to put into the communication.

High Stakes: When I think of high stakes, I think of sales. You are selling something to a decision maker. It could be selling a product to a customer or selling an idea internally or externally to your company. It could be communicating with someone you infrequently interact with at a current customer (customers almost always hold the power in conversations). Clarity is critical for high stakes communications because your audience is typically unforgiving: you may only get one shot. You need to pay special consideration to your audience’s perspectives, motivations, and knowledge. For example, if you’re selling something, your audience may not know who you are and what problem of theirs you solve. I receive at least ten cold sales emails per day where I’m unable to quickly determine what the company does and why it is relevant to me.

Consequential: There are two common types of Consequential communications: to your bosses and to your customers. Both hold power over you, and you communicate with them fairly frequently, meaning the consequences of poor communication could be significant (e.g., your boss or your customer perceiving you as incompetent). Clarity matters in these conversations, but you may get another opportunity to clarify your thinking further. The biggest mistakes I see in Consequential communications are making incorrect assumptions of the audience's background knowledge and perspectives. Often, the person writing the communication has deep knowledge of a situation or idea. The person proceeds to write in a way that assumes knowledge the audience does not have or may have forgotten, leading to confusion, misunderstanding, and the dismissal of good ideas.

Moderate Stakes: Moderate stakes communications are often internal to your company. You may not have frequent communications with people outside of your team, but your audience may have similar or lower power dynamics. Your audience is likely to be more forgiving in these situations, although clarity still matters for speed. For example, you may request someone to take an action such as providing you information. The person will likely do it because of the power dynamics; however, the person may not complete the request timely or correctly if the message creates confusion or misunderstanding. Closely attending to background knowledge and perspectives may not matter as much in these communications, provided the actions can be completed with the information provided.

Low Stakes: Low stakes communications are frequent communications you send within your immediate team or people you regularly work with within your company (or contractors). These communications are often forgiving because the audience feels comfortable asking for clarification as needed. It’s also safer to assume prerequisite background knowledge of items team members are intimately involved with, and you may not need to attend to your teammates’ perspectives as much if they are at a lower power dynamic. You still want to be clear in your communications to increase speed and work product quality, but you probably don’t need to perseverate on every word.

I will write in more depth about audience in a future essay as your audience is the single most important consideration in your writing. You don’t want readers thinking: how is this relevant; these points don’t make sense; these points don’t feel thought through; what is going on here; what do they want me to do, or what action should I take? 

Step 5: Identify the channel you will use

Your workplace culture and practices are the most important considerations in which channel to use. For example, at Prompt, we use Slack for all internal communications. Often, the longer-form ideas we’re communicating and documenting are in Notion (a Google Docs-like collaborative tool). We use Slack because it feels lower-stakes and more forgiving even when there are power differences involved. Most of our external communication is by email, although we sometimes use texts for more urgent external needs. Ultimately, it’s sometimes easier to call or Zoom someone depending on the type of request or answer you are providing. The main points here are that your choice of channel matters, and you should use channels in the same way most people use them within your company. For example, if your company is email-first, use email for standard communications and messenger for more instant needs. If your team and company don’t have channel norms, you should implement norms. I’ll be writing on written communication channel strategies in more depth in a future essay.

Step 6: Identify your structure and create a plan

You will use the communication type, stakes, and channel to determine the structure you will use and the types of content you will include within your communication. There are many types of structures that I’ll cover in future essays. However, I’ll cover a generic structure here that works well for most communications. I typically plan in my mind before writing, but I do write an outline for longer-form communications.

• Greeting – Hi!

• Context (if applicable) – What is the situation? Is there any clarifying commentary that would be helpful prior to stating the purpose? This is often unnecessary for lower-stakes communications.

• Purpose and goals – Why are you writing? What is the intended result? Include a heads up for people if there will be specific actions for them to take.

• Details – The meat of the communication. This could be anything from an update to an answer to a question on a new idea.

• Actions (if applicable) – What specific actions do others need to take? Are there next steps you will be taking?

• Sign off – Enjoy!

Step 7: Write

You’ve already done the hard work. You know what structure to use, and you’ve planned your content while considering your purpose, goals, and audience. Now, you just need to write the message. People often flexibly switch between planning, writing, and revising throughout the writing process. This is important as you should continually self-assess and evaluate your writing from your audience's perspective to make sure it contains all of the information, context, and components required for success.

Step 8: Revise

After writing, I always revise before sending. The one exception is low-stakes, relatively short communications with my team over Slack. We’ve been intentional about having a culture where minor mistakes (e.g., grammar) are acceptable (i.e., no one will judge you). It’s also likely the conversation participants will have enough background knowledge to fill any gaps in thinking and context (the Slack edit button can be your friend if there is confusion).

When revising, I do two passes: first for content and structure, second for style. I wrote at length about what makes a good writer in a previous essay, and I attend to all of these things while revising. I first consider my audience and their perspectives, motivations, and background knowledge. I read with a close eye for identifying places that may cause confusion and misunderstanding. Second, I read for style. I dive in on readability and flow, but I also deeply consider grammar. While I believe grammar perfection isn’t necessary for understanding writing, many people perceive it to be important. Therefore, I make sure to read through every word assisted by a grammar checking tool such as Grammarly.

Step 9: Determine the time to send

Once a message is ready, you need to determine when to send it. This will depend on the urgency, audience, and channel. Typically you want to send during business hours or a time when you know the other person is working. You can often set a delayed send on an email. If you do not want to (or cannot) delay sending it until regular business hours, be clear about when you expect a response and clarify that the recipient doesn't need to look at the communication right away. This is especially important for power dynamics where the person you are sending to is lower.

Where to go from here

The General Framework for written communications in the workplace will eventually become second nature to you. Your goal from today forward should be to deliberately practice using the framework and introduce the framework to your team. Prompt can help. We have professional written communications courses that don’t just teach strategies; we deliberately practice written communications through individualized instruction and feedback. Reach out to me at brad@prompt.com if you’re interested in a course for your team or company.

Over time, you’ll find yourself and your team improving how you communicate. You’ll also find yourself getting much faster with using the framework. You’ll find yourself and your team getting things done faster and having higher quality. Writing is truly the lifeblood of any organization.

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Many of the fastest-growing, most innovative companies in the world are great at writing, such as Amazon, Tesla, and Procter & Gamble. These companies have specific writing methods and practices on which they train their employees. Stagnating companies are typically poor at writing. These companies don’t have standard ways of communicating and writing.

A framework for why writing matters

I’ve spent years thinking about why writing matters to companies and how companies can write better. In this essay, I’m going to focus on why writing matters. I wish I had an analysis that ties great writing to publicly available quantitative measures of company success (e.g., growth rate). But, it’s not possible given the many confounding factors such as market, age, and size. Instead, I use a three-point logic-based argument for why writing matters:

1. Great writing signals a company is competent.

2. Great writing increases speed.

3. Great writing improves idea quality.

I’m going to break down each in detail. My goal is to help you understand why you need to improve your writing and writing throughout your workplace.

1. Great writing signals a company is competent

Great writing signals competence. Poor writing signals incompetence. Think about the emails you receive from employees. Are they well written? Or, are you often left confused and unclear about what is happening or needs to happen? Think about the PowerPoints and memos you read. Are they well written? Or, are you often left confused and unclear about whether an idea is thought through or worth doing?

Now, think about your customers. Your colleagues are communicating with your customers in the same way they communicate with you – or worse since they probably spend more time on communications to their bosses. In other words, your employees’ writing signals the competence of your whole organization.

Taking this further, your customers’ perception of your company’s competence is equivalent to your customers’ perception of the lowest-level employee they interact with. A customer’s perception of your company’s competence is critical. Good perceptions lead to customer retention, revenue growth, and referrals. Poor perceptions lead to churn and negative reviews. 

Writing (emails, instant messenger, texting) is increasingly important in customer interactions. Writing-related skills, such as accurately interpreting and clearly communicating information, are critical for direct interactions with customers and internal operations to serve customers.

2. Great writing increases speed

Good writers write with purpose, clarity, coherence, and style (see my essay What makes a great writer). The more good writers your company has, the fewer misunderstandings employees will have, and the faster things will get done. Employees will know what they’re supposed to be doing (and why) and have the information and context they need to complete tasks and form new ideas.

Now, think about yourself and your company. How quickly do you respond to an email or message? How quickly do people respond to you? Often, delayed responses are due to confusion – What exactly does the person need to do, and by when? How important is it? Poor, unclear writing can cause delays for hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Internal operations move slowly and rarely improve. Great ideas take a long time to be evaluated and implemented (if ever).

Great writing has a significant impact on the velocity at which a company supports customers, operates, and ships new products and product updates. Writing is a key reason why Amazon, likely the best large-scale writing company in the world, also ships the fastest.

3. Great writing improves idea quality

Well-structured logic clarifies thinking. The act of writing helps people structure their thinking. It helps people identify and attend to other perspectives and determine other paths of inquiry (e.g., analysis) that can further improve ideas. 

Writing also provides something for others to react to. Readers can better understand an author’s idea and logic, more easily identify gaps, and provide feedback to further refine and improve an idea. Writing gives life, depth, and breadth to an idea. A well-written memo or PowerPoint convinces others and contains well-considered ideas that are more likely to succeed.

Now, think about yourself and your company. When was a good idea of yours dismissed? When did you dismiss someone else’s idea? Perhaps your boss felt your idea wasn’t thought through or worth doing. Perhaps your boss didn’t understand why your idea was important. Perhaps you aren’t giving enough consideration to or furthering feedback on your team’s ideas.

Amazon and Procter & Gamble have specific memo styles on which they train employees. At Amazon (and at Prompt), every great idea and new product starts its life as a memo. Jeff Bezos put his thoughts on Amazon’s Six-page Narrative Memos in his 2017 Annual Letter. I’m reprinting the entire memo section here as it’s well written, and Jeff’s perspectives are valuable for how I think about writing in the workplace.

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.

In the handstand example, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize high standards. It wouldn’t be difficult to lay out in detail the requirements of a well-executed handstand, and then you’re either doing it or you’re not. The writing example is very different. The difference between a great memo and an average one is much squishier. It would be extremely hard to write down the detailed requirements that make up a great memo. Nevertheless, I find that much of the time, readers react to great memos very similarly. They know it when they see it. The standard is there, and it is real, even if it’s not easily describable.

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

Making writing matter in your workplace

Writing is a requirement for competence. Writing is a requirement for innovation. Companies rarely train people to write, and people rarely receive feedback on their writing. As such, people stagnate in their roles, and companies stagnate in their market, unable to innovate and effectively serve their customers.

Don’t leave writing to chance. Writing is a learnable skill. Improve your writing. Improve your customers’ perception of your company’s competence. Supercharge your company’s innovation engine by increasing speed and improving idea quality. Add writing evaluation to your hiring and promotion process. Develop standard writing practices for interactions both within and outside of your team or company. Train your team or employees on how they can become better writers. 

Please reach out to me at brad@prompt.com if you’d like to discuss how you or your company can become better writers. Future essays will dive deeper into specific strategies for writing in the workplace – emails, instant messages, memos, PowerPoints, and proposals.

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To be a good writer, you must be perceived as intelligent and competent. Why? It’s because...

You don’t get to decide whether you are a good writer. Your audience does.

Let’s go through a thought exercise. Who do you consider to be intelligent and competent? You base your perceptions of others on outward expressions of their intelligence and competence. These outward expressions tend to relate to how people communicate – their speaking and writing – or how others communicate about them – others’ speaking and writing. Communication is the only way for us to create an opinion of someone. 

What about your writing makes your audience think you are a good writer? I’ve spent years investigating what makes an audience believe a person is a good writer. I’ve found it comes down to four equally important things: purpose, clarity, coherence, and style. At Prompt, we call these four items our “Framework for Good Writing.” Below, we cover the framework from a business, academic, or personal perspective. The framework also applies to narrative and creative writing, but we’ll not focus on these linkages here.

A Framework for Good Writing

Writing skills are a prerequisite for critical thinking (see my essay Writing is the Gateway to Critical Thinking). As such, the Framework for Good Writing we use at Prompt interlinks with many critical thinking skills (e.g., clarity and coherence).

The four components of good writing are intertwined – you need all to be a good writer. For example, it’s difficult to meet the bar for coherence without clarity and purpose. A writer with strong purpose, clarity, and coherence can still fail without a good style by leaving the audience bored and with a wandering mind. Below, we discuss the four components.

Purpose

Why are you writing? What idea are you hoping to communicate? What are you trying to achieve? The purpose is the first stage gate for being perceived as intelligent and competent. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, the world’s premier startup accelerator, puts it well in his essay How to Write Usefully: “Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.” 

I take it a step further. My writing aims to bring clear and structured thinking to a truth people may not know or may already believe (or are predisposed to believe) but cannot articulate well. Often, my audience may agree with my premise before reading, meaning they “already know” the truth; however, the audience finds value in my frameworks, language, perspectives, and evidence. My structures, not the overarching concept I’m writing about, are meant to be things Paul Graham refers to as “they didn’t already know,” and my language, reasoning, and evidence are meant to “tell them as unequivocally as possible.”

As a hypothetical example, you may have a good idea for your company. Nearly everyone is likely to agree your idea is interesting, and they may have thought of the idea themselves in the past. The purpose of your writing is not just to explain the idea but to convince your audience it is worth doing and describe how the idea should be executed.

In this essay, my purpose is to provide a common language for understanding what makes a writer good. Many people probably have some semblance of what makes writing good, but they struggle to articulate it well in a clear, cohesive argument. My writing is telling you some information you may already believe to be true, but it is presenting information in a clear, cohesive argument that gives you a framework and language to use when discussing what makes a good writer. Without a clearly defined purpose, my audience would struggle to perceive me as intelligent and competent. They would be left thinking, “what is the point?” and “how is this relevant?” instead of “this makes sense” and “I’m going to use this.”

Clarity

Clarity is the ability to clearly express one’s ideas and thoughts in writing the audience can easily understand. Clarity is hard. Give 10 people the same thing to read, and there could be 10 different interpretations. It’s nearly impossible to write something that every person understands in the same way. People have different life experiences, background knowledge, and thoughts they bring to everything they read. Said another way, clarity is on a spectrum. The lower the variability in interpretation, the clearer the writing.

I define the variability in interpretation as the distance between what the author truly meant and how the intended audience interpreted it. For example, low variability would be everyone in the audience identifying the same or similar purpose/main point and pulling out similar supporting facts. High variability is when the purpose/main point varies widely among the audience. The highest variability occurs when every audience member interprets the meaning as the complete opposite of the author’s intent.

Clarity matters because a lack of it breeds confusion and misinterpretation. And, confusion and misinterpretation create conflict, slows the speed at which things get done, and results in the dismissal of great ideas. Clear writing signals intelligence and competence. It gets everyone on the same page, thereby increasing the speed at which things get done and resulting in executing against great ideas.

Coherence

Coherence is the ability to clearly and logically connect ideas to create a unified argument or thought. Coherent writing allows an audience to easily and clearly follow and interpret the author’s thoughts without finding unsupported or extraneous claims or significant gaps in logic.

Like clarity, coherence can be difficult because people bring different life experiences, background knowledge, and perspectives to everything they read. As such, an audience may perceive gaps in logic that the author may not believe are there. However, the audience is always right. A confused or dissenting audience will perceive the writer as not intelligent or incompetent. 

Writing coherently seeks to mitigate confusion and often persuades the audience to the writer’s point of view. The writer can identify and address potential gaps in their thinking. They can string together complex thoughts in support of a unifying idea or argument by logically supporting claims with the proper and accurate use of evidence. They can flexibly identify, synthesize, and accurately use sources. They can anticipate and attend to their audience’s background knowledge and perspectives. They can integrate additional information and thoughts from beyond or deeper within the subject at hand to both better frame the argument within a broader whole and provide the detail necessary to better support their thoughts.

Style

Style is the way a writer writes. Good writers have an engaging style. They leave you wanting to read more. They have you leaning in from start to finish, agreeing with each successive point. Here are some of the more important components of style.

• Syntactical Fluency. This fancy-sounding term just means to vary your sentence structures. Varying sentence structures makes your writing more engaging and enjoyable. You should vary sentence length. Vary subjects, verbs, and predicates. Make use of synonyms instead of using the same word over and over. Place prepositional phrases in different locations. Syntactical fluency is a difficult skill to build. I often find myself reading for opportunities to improve my sentence variability when I’m revising.

• Readability. Readability is the ease with which your audience can read your words and sentences. Ease matters because you don’t want your audience to need to work to understand what you’re trying to say. The more work you put on your audience, the more likely it is that they’ll be confused. Most readability measures use sentence length and word length – the longer, the harder it is to read. However, there are other considerations such as prepositional phrase use, like this phrase in the middle of a sentence, that can make reading a given sentence much more difficult.

• Cohesion. Cohesion is the flow of your writing. It’s the connective tissue across paragraphs and between sentences that make it easier for your reader to understand the points you are making. At a lower level, cohesion is the connecting words between sentences. At a higher level, cohesion requires beginning paragraphs and sentences with information familiar to readers and then ending with information readers may not anticipate. Put simply, your audience prefers to start with what’s easy and familiar before getting to what’s hard and complex.

• Anecdotes. Anecdotes are stories with a point. Stories resonate with people and make important points you’re making clearer. Often these are qualitative examples that serve as supporting evidence to an important point (that may be quantitative). People remember anecdotes, and anecdotes often serve as talking points for fully forming how an idea will work in practice.

• Vocabulary. Vocabulary usage is often associated with intelligence. However, it can be a double-edged sword. Misuse a word, and people may perceive you as a poor writer, discounting the rest of your work. Use a word that’s unknown to your audience, and your audience may struggle to understand you. My general strategy is to keep my vocabulary simple. Occasionally, I use more complex words if they pop into my head while I’m writing. However, I almost always look the word up to make sure I’m using it correctly, and I think about whether my audience will know it or at least be able to understand it within the context of the writing.

• Grammar Mechanics. I saved grammar until the end because I dislike the extreme importance some people give to it. Grammar is just a common set of rules that exist to make it possible to understand each other. A minor grammatical error is unlikely to decrease someone’s comprehension of the writing. However, many people are sticklers for grammar. Poor grammar is one of the quickest ways to lose an audience, meaning they’ll perceive you as not intelligent and incompetent, even if the rest of the writing is great. As such, it’s often critical to get grammar right – you cannot assume your audience does not care. Always take extra care to consider grammar when revising your work.

Implications for your writing

Being a good writer requires your audience to perceive you as a good writer. They need to perceive you as intelligent and competent. As you plan, write, and revise, make sure you’re considering the four interconnected components of good writing: purpose, clarity, coherence, and style. Keep in mind, you must attend to your audience’s perspectives (a topic for another day), as they matter more than you. Your audience decides if your writing is clear. Your audience decides if your writing makes logical sense. Keep your audience engaged and win them over to your thinking. Only then will you be a good writer.

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In this issue, we’re going to start by exploring why people’s perceptions of their writing abilities don’t match reality. Then, we’re going to discuss how to break this perception. By the end, you’ll have actionable steps for evaluating yourself, providing feedback to help those around you match their perceptions with reality, and building writing skills in yourself and others.

Writing and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

The gap between perceived and actual writing abilities is a classic case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. People with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. People with high ability at a task underestimate their ability with respect to others, as they perceive other people as being better than the other people actually are.1 

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is powerful. Let’s take a look at two writing-skill-related charts from the 1999 article Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.2 The first is on grammar ability, and the second is on logical reasoning ability.

The magnitude of the gap between perceived and actual abilities is astounding. Students in the bottom quartile perceive their abilities as similar to the abilities of students in the top quartile. Students in the top quartile tend to be self-aware that they are skilled. However, they have a lower perception of their abilities than their actual abilities when asked to compare their abilities with the abilities of others. This is because top-quartile students perceive others as being more skilled than the others actually are.

Now, let’s apply the Dunning-Kruger Effect more directly to writing in education and the workplace, where there’s a significant gap between perceived and actual abilities. We find this gap is often compounded by educators and managers providing limited (or zero) writing feedback as they are strapped for time and want to avoid conflict. These incentives reinforce low performers’ belief that they are competent.

Students: No feedback + a good grade = students think they’re good.

We know actual student writing abilities are poor. 3 in 4 high school students score below proficient on writing. Only 3% of students are advanced.3 

We know students tend to only receive positive indicators of their performance. In 2013, nearly 50% of university students in a given course received A’s, and the average GPA was 3.15 (compared with 30% and 2.85 respectively in the 1980s).4 Additionally, we know students rarely receive or act on feedback on their writing. When students do receive feedback, it tends to be surface-level (e.g., grammar) and is dismissed.5

Nearly everything educators do confirms the bias that students are better writers than they actually are. Let’s take a look at two examples to put the perception and ability gap in more context. 

Example 1: In Prompt’s work preparing students for writing-intensive AP exams, we surveyed students and found nearly 3 in 4 had an A or A- in their class. Yet, when asked what they expected to receive on the exams, about the same number said a 3, which is equivalent to a B-, C+ or C in the college course.6 The students’ A grades provided a confirmation bias – that they are good. However, they were unable to evaluate their situation – the same work would generate a C grade in college.

Example 2: I vividly remember a snarky email I received from a student back when Prompt was testing a new service. We let students upload any assignment and receive a grade and two points of high-level feedback on their content and structure. The service’s purpose was to help people realize the gap between their perceived and actual writing ability (for free). I filled out the rubric, which resulted in a C+. The student replied, “Well, you can’t be right because I got a 94%.” I thought I was being nice; the essay didn’t even have a thesis statement and lacked a coherent line of thought. This is merely one memorable example of a pattern we see across education.

Professionals: No feedback + positive performance reviews = people think they’re good.

We know workplace writing abilities are poor. Employers believe only 45% of new college graduates have adequate written communication skills for the workforce, and only 57% have adequate critical thinking and problem solving skills.7 These numbers overstate writing abilities; the problem is actually far worse, as discussed in my essay, Writing is the Gateway to Critical Thinking. United States companies spend more than $3B per year remediating writing.8 I routinely hear corporate executives lament the state of writing skills among their employees. Yet, at the individual level, most people think they’re good.

We know employees rarely receive feedback on their writing.9 Think about the last time you received valuable feedback on something you’ve written. Think about the last time you provided detailed feedback on something someone sent you. I bet these are not frequent occurrences. If they are, think about colleagues you’ve had or companies you’ve worked at or with. Writing feedback is not the norm. Instead, the audience stalls or dismisses the thoughts because they are confused. The writer never sees the confusion and instead writes off a non or delayed response as being unimportant or a bad idea rather than due to poor writing.

Leaders and Educators: Only evaluating the result + limited time = you believe your team and students are better than they are.

How often do you give a task to someone and get back something you weren’t quite expecting? It’s probably almost always worse than you were expecting. Perhaps it just doesn’t seem well thought through, or it’s written in a confusing manner. Often, we just dismiss these situations. Perhaps we believe we must not have explained what we wanted well enough. Perhaps the person didn’t have the context or time needed. Perhaps you should have just done it yourself.

We often don’t spend the time required to analyze the root causes of poor results. If you are a strong writer, spending limited time evaluating the result likely leads to a Dunning-Kruger Effect. Even though you know the result is poor, your perception of the other person’s abilities is still actually higher than their abilities actually are. This is a critical problem you need to be self-aware of, or else any feedback you do provide will require too high of ability levels, making it hard for the person to implement.

When we spend the time analyzing a person’s writing process and results, we find surprising things that feel basic to “good writers” but cannot be assumed for poor writers. In writing, we often find students and professionals struggling with foundational skills, such as the sources skills of the Writing to Learn Framework presented in my essay, Learning Through Writing. Poor abilities with identifying, comprehending, synthesizing, and using sources can be underlying issues that go unnoticed and therefore unsolved. Without solving the underlying issues, it becomes impossible to improve the higher-order writing skills that present more clearly as a problem.

Breaking the “I’m a good writer” mindset

There is good news. It is possible to make people self-aware of their abilities and generate improvement. Kruger and Dunning manipulated a student’s competence by providing instruction in hopes of building metacognitive skills (thinking about one’s thinking). Upon providing the instruction, students were able to more appropriately judge their skills and even improve their abilities.10

For writing, closing the gap between perceived and actual abilities requires two things. First, students and professionals need to receive actionable feedback on their actual performance – not just a generalized score or comment but targeted improvements to make. Second, they need to receive instruction as the metacognitive skills required to produce writing are nearly identical to the skills required to evaluate writing. Instruction targeted at building self-regulation allows students and professionals to self-monitor and evaluate their own writing, which allows them to more closely match the perception of their abilities with their actual abilities, a prerequisite for improving skills.

Implications for improving writing

The first step to making people better writers is to make them aware that they have a problem. This is hard. No one likes to get feedback that they aren’t as good at something as they thought they were. This is why the feedback needs to be specific, actionable, and instructional. People need to receive instruction so that they build metacognitive skills they can use to evaluate their own writing.

Leaders need to understand that some people are far less skilled than they seem to be. The starting point from which we need to improve skills is almost always lower than we think. I’m often guilty of this as well. I provide feedback in ways I believe people can understand and learn from, but the person I provide feedback to may struggle to interpret the feedback and implement it appropriately. If I’m unaware of this problem, I may write it off to incompetence – i.e., the person just isn’t good or doesn’t get it. Instead, I need to be aware that my initial assessment of their abilities was incorrect. The feedback I provided may have assumed skills the person did not have. I can then solve for the root cause of their confusion so I can provide clearer instructions that match their abilities and generalize and transfer to their future work.

The first thing you should do is evaluate your own writing. Do your perceptions match your actual skills? Consider having a deep conversation with a colleague you communicate with frequently. Bring specific writing examples and ask targeted questions. What is the purpose of each piece? Where is the writing confusing? Why may someone not have agreed with it or acted on it?

Next, evaluate the writing of those around you (your students or team members). Consider the feedback you’ve provided in the past (if any) and evaluate if your students or team members have taken appropriate steps to generalize the feedback in their subsequent writing. Then, consider setting up a one-on-one with each person to talk specifically about writing. This will take some preparation as you’ll need to provide specific examples from a person’s writing and instruction on how they can improve. Your goal is to build awareness of the problem and put in place an improvement plan. This is time-intensive, but it will pay long-term dividends.

At Prompt, we build writing skills through deliberate practice, consisting of instruction, feedback, and self-regulation (see my essay, The best way to improve writing). We often find working with us is the first time students and professionals realize they are poor writers for the abilities required to meet their goals (e.g., getting into a specific college, landing a certain job, succeeding in their job, earning a promotion). Helping people understand they are bad at writing is the first step in helping them become better writers.

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Before we begin, let’s first consider a high-level view of what deliberate practice steps look like for writing. A person begins with planning and then moves to writing. After completing a draft, they go through the receiving feedback and revising loop multiple times to continuously improve the writing before completing the work.

Admittedly, the diagram lacks the complex nature of deliberately practicing each step, which we’ll get into later. However, I like to use this simplified version to set up two critical concepts we’ll keep coming back to throughout this essay and future writing.

1. Coaching: People need support at each step of deliberate practice. This is the same as having a great sports coach, music teacher, or educator. The better the coaching someone receives, the better they will be at a skill. The coaching concept also ties with Bloom’s (1968) 2 Sigma Problem where an average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning performed 98% better than an average student in a control class.22

2. Self-regulation: Self-regulation strategies are guided by metacognitive skills (thinking about one’s thinking). The strategies are recursive, where writers flexibly switch between the planning, writing, and revising processes. They allow people to perform deliberate practice independently by monitoring and evaluating their own writing and thoughts at each step. Building self-regulation skills for writing greatly improves outcomes. For example, Self-regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) for writing planning has had an average effect size of one across more than one hundred studies, meaning students perform one standard deviation better on average than a control group.3

Coaching and self-regulation go hand in hand. Some people build self-regulation strategies on their own; however, I believe the vast majority of people struggle to identify and build these strategies without individualized coaching. Coaching also continues to build new self-regulation practices on the foundation of old ones, continually introducing more and more complex strategies as a person becomes a better writer. The most esteemed writers in the world all have great coaches (e.g., editors).

My formative writing experiences

I often dislike myself as a writer. I often struggle to clearly get my thoughts on a page (or screen). It frustrates me. As I’m writing this, I know I need to go back to everything I’ve already written to improve it. It’s just not clear! However, I’ll leave it to a future essay to walk through my writing and revising process. Now, why am I telling you about my struggles? It’s to lead into an exercise. I want you to think about your experiences where you found yourself rapidly improving your writing skills. I’m going to go through this exercise now.

1. AP European History. Mr. Bekemeyer had a profound effect on my writing. He beat structure into me. He pushed hard on content, structure, reasoning, and clarity. I often got a B or C on a first draft (first draft As were rare). I then revised using his feedback until I got an A. Sometimes, it would take four drafts.

2. McKinsey. I first realized I was a terrible writer when I started at McKinsey. I joined after graduating from MIT and spent over four years improving my writing skills. First, I went through training on how to plan and structure a document. Then, I received feedback on my planning and writing on a daily basis from other McKinsey consultants. I also experienced how the audience (clients) responded to the documents to better help revise and structure my thinking. The PowerPoint writing I did also helped me synthesize my thoughts into headlines with supporting evidence, determine what was important, create coherence in my arguments (i.e., the flow of logic from slide to slide), and forced me to be exceptionally concise (e.g., the space limitations of bullet points). 

3. Writing a book. I decided to write a book in 2013, Embrace the Case Interview. The purpose was to help aspiring consultants be more prepared when interviewing. Writing a book built many of my self-regulation skills. I was continuously monitoring what I wrote and making adjustments, often because I was unhappy with the flow of the logic within and across chapters. I probably revised each chapter at least five times, and my older brother was kind enough to provide feedback (often tearing my logic or structure apart). The result was 347 pages and about 2,000 books sold to date. 

4. Starting Prompt. Jordan, John, and I started Prompt in 2014. We initially provided all of the writing feedback ourselves. This process greatly helped me build mental models for dissecting other people’s writing and understanding how I could coach people to improve as well as how I could train people to be coaches. I found my own self-regulation strategies for revising my own writing have immensely improved as I continue providing feedback to others.

5. Writing about Prompt. Today, I spend hours per week penning my thoughts on writing and analyzing sources. I find this process helps crystalize my ideas and enables me to more effectively identify strategies, design products, and speak about what we do in compelling ways. I rely on the self-regulation strategies for planning, writing, and revising that I’ve built up over the years. But, I still ensure I get feedback on my writing from my team and our advisors. For example, my co-founder, John, often rips apart the logic on the early drafts for my newsletter.

Now for some reflection. I cannot remember any profound effects on my writing from a K-12 or MIT educator other than Mr. Bekemeyer. I believe it’s because I did what most other students did. I just wrote and completed. I didn’t bother much with planning or revising. My instructors didn’t spend much time teaching planning. I rarely received meaningful feedback or revised my writing. I generally got a good enough grade, so I didn’t bother to change. I rarely cared about my writing until I started in the workforce. I had yet to understand the profound importance of written communication, and I couldn’t have cared less about Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Every time I felt my skills dramatically improving, I was going through deliberate practice, whether I had a “coach” or I was using my own self-regulation strategies. I assume you and anyone else reading this have had similar experiences – you improved because you were deliberately practicing your writing.

Improving writing

The most effective implementation of deliberate practice leverages both coaching and self-regulation. The coaching is primarily applied in the planning and receiving feedback stages. It can also be valuable during writing and revising to teach self-regulation strategies to people who do not yet have these strategies fully-formed. 

As alluded to earlier, the writing process is messier than the word “writing” seems to entail – there are recursive loops of self-regulation everywhere. Planning may occur at a higher level before putting fingers to keyboard or thumbs to phone; however, a writer is continually revisiting and adjusting the plan as they are writing. A writer is continually revising their words, structure, and thoughts. Writing with self-regulation has pathways everywhere – pathways writers often don’t even realize they’re taking because they are second-nature.

There are all kinds of self-regulation strategies to build. If given time, I can identify hundreds (or thousands) I use every time I plan, write, and revise. You would be hard-pressed to write a single word without using some ingrained self-regulation strategy. These include sentence-level self-regulation for grammar (e.g., subject-verb agreement) and syntactical fluency (e.g., varying sentence structures). These also include higher-order skills such as evaluating the accuracy of sources, synthesizing sources, identifying logic gaps, developing a structure, and attending to an audience’s perspectives.

Where we go from here

If you’re trying to improve your own writing, get a coach. Identify what self-regulation strategies are your strengths and where you need to improve. Spend time planning, writing, and revising. More broadly, if you’re reading this, you likely are a decent writer compared with the rest of the world. This is where things get tricky.

People need coaching and engaging in the writing process to build self-regulation strategies and improve their writing. Unfortunately, our education system and professional world are not structured to improve writing. Most students and professionals write and complete without planning, revising, or receiving feedback. People are rarely coached on how to plan their writing, and people rarely receive honest and effective feedback or act on the feedback they receive.

The result, based on my synthesis of many sources, is that only 1 in 10 people exit the US education system with adequate writing skills for the workforce. Anecdotally, this number is far worse as nearly every executive I speak with laments the state of their employees’ writing skills. 

Now, you’re probably wondering, “how do we implement deliberate practice and fix writing in education and the workforce.” I have many thoughts, but we’re out of space for this week. Feel free to reach out if you want any sneak peeks of what’s to come.

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Writing to Learn is a complex skillset. It’s one part the writing process, another part using sources, and another part critical thinking. It’s also the most important skillset for learning and developing your thoughts on any topic.

This essay aims to posit Prompt’s Writing to Learn Framework that distills the skills required to be an effective writer and thereby critical thinker. But first, I start by reflecting on my learning and critical thinking process as I developed the Writing to Learn Framework. My reflection will help clarify writing’s central role in developing thought.

My Writing to Learn Experience

Over the past year, I’ve spent hundreds of hours learning and thinking about writing instruction. My journey started by realizing that my company, Prompt, needed to solve writing instruction before, during, and after writing to achieve our mission of making people better writers. Prompt started as a writing feedback company, providing feedback only after people wrote a draft. Yet, we often found the students and people we worked with missed the mark with their first drafts – they didn’t understand the goals of their writing (e.g., what their audience was looking for), struggled to create a cohesive argument, often didn’t accurately use supporting evidence, and were unable to identify gaps in their logic. As such, the feedback we provided often required a person to start over and work from the scaffolding we provided.

Like all good learners, writers, and thinkers, I started my learning journey with a set of questions I set out to answer (i.e., my learning goals).

1. What are the best ways to teach writing? 

2. Are these methods being used in the classroom? If not, why? 

3. How can I scale providing high-quality writing instruction?

Then, I sought information. In particular, I focused on finding syntheses of evidence-based interventions and instruction methodologies. One book I found particularly useful was The Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Third Edition, as it was written and edited by prominent writing researchers and synthesized the findings of hundreds of studies and interventions.¹

Then, I went through a learning process by engaging with the source materials. I’ve outlined my learning process in the diagram below and the description that follows.

1. Information Building Blocks. I studied and annotated sources as these form the evidence to support synthesized thoughts. 

2. Moving from Annotation to Synthesis. When I had a particularly revelatory annotation, I jumped to synthesis by combining my new thought with previous thoughts and other information while attending to my learning goals.

3. Thought Creation. As I created thoughts, I evaluated them and determined what the next steps should be – e.g., Did I need to gather more information? Did I need to improve my logic? Was it time to start crystallizing my thoughts in writing? 

4. Crystallize Thoughts in Writing. Once I felt good about a thought, I wanted to flesh it out in more structured writing. This helped me crystallize my thoughts and identify gaps in my logic and arguments, which led me to reflect on my ideas – e.g., Was my synthesis an accurate portrayal of the information? Were there other questions or ideas that arose that I needed to go back to source materials to answer or evaluate?

The act of writing was the critical part of the learning process. I wrote when I annotated. I wrote when I synthesized and evaluated my thoughts. I wrote when I combined multiple thoughts. I wrote when I identified gaps in my reasoning. I wrote hundreds of pages of annotated notes, syntheses of sources, syntheses across sources, and finally, a distillation of all of my thoughts into a single, coherent, and cohesive document on Prompt’s approach to writing instruction.

Prompt’s Writing to Learn Framework 

My synthesis of evidence-based writing instruction methods pointed to Writing to Learn as the key concept for improving writing outcomes. Engaging with writing researchers cemented my belief. When I refer to writing as a Gateway Skill to critical thinking and problem solving, I am referring to the Writing to Learn skillset; learning and thinking are synonymous with writing in the creation of new ideas and knowledge.

So, let’s more clearly define Writing to Learn. Writing to Learn is the skillset people use to generate insight and understanding from a vast array of information sources. Writing to Learn is a generalizable, transferable, goal-oriented skillset people can apply independently to any subject or topic. Without writing to learn skills, students cannot succeed in the classroom, and professionals cannot succeed in the workplace.

Unfortunately, most people struggle with Writing to Learn. They are unable to generate insight and understanding from information sources because they lack the foundational reading comprehension, summarization, synthesis, and writing planning skills.¹ I created the Writing to Learn Framework to better visualize the skills required to be effective writers and learners.

The framework matches well with the research and my learning process I outlined above. First and foremost, people need sources skills. They need to be able to comprehend what they read by identifying and accurately using information. They need to be able to summarize what they’ve read as summarization forms the Building Blocks of evidence for supporting an argument. They then need to be able to synthesize information within and across sources – the core component of Thought Creation. Once a person has a sources skills foundation, they are able to write from sources by going through the writing process to Crystallize Thoughts in Writing.

Concluding thoughts

Our education system fails to teach Writing to Learn. It’s why critical thinking and problem solving are such valued and rare skills. Many people are unable to answer questions about what they read in a text. Many are unable to accurately summarize what they read. Many are unable to synthesize a source or across sources. Without sources skills, it’s difficult to learn something new or develop a coherent set of thoughts on a topic. As such, many people struggle to matriculate and persist in postsecondary education, and my analysis indicates only 1 in 10 people exit our education system (K-12 and higher ed) with adequate writing skills for the workforce.

Circling back to my three learning goals, I believe I now have answers for all. First, there are a clear set of best practices for teaching and improving writing. Second, these methods are not being used in the classroom because teaching Writing to Learn is complex, mentally-taxing, and time-consuming. Third, it is possible to scale providing high-quality writing instruction for K-12, higher ed, and professionals.

That’s enough for now. There is a LOT to cover in future posts on how to tactically implement Writing to Learn at scale – something we’re actively working on at Prompt. However, I’ll leave you with a quick thought exercise I recommend doing – reflect on your own learning process and how you create and structure your thoughts. When do you write? What do you write? How do you use writing to generate the outcome you desire? Then, reflect on your perceptions of how other people you know well learn and structure their thoughts. Do you believe their process is effective?... I bet you often find yourself spotting seemingly obvious logic gaps – a signal that they need to improve their writing to learn skills.

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¹ Graham, S., MacArthur C. A., & Herbert, M. (Eds.). (2018). Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Third Edition. The Guilford Press.

I believe these employers are wrong about recent college graduates – they are actually far worse. At McKinsey, I had the privilege of interviewing more than 100 top-performing students, from MIT and Stanford undergrads to Harvard, Sloan, and Booth MBAs. In the interviews, I presented them with a business case to test their critical thinking and problem solving. The pass rate was 25% (at best). In other words, only between 2 and 5 in 100 students at the world’s top schools met the bar.

I spent years contemplating why top students at top schools failed at seemingly straightforward critical thinking and problem solving tasks. I spent years reflecting on my work with clients. Finally, I realized what my consulting role really was – translating what employees were thinking into something executives could understand. Finally, I understood why top students at top schools failed the interviews – the rote learning they spent their lives mastering makes it difficult to deal with ambiguity. Everything pointed in one direction, a direction I foreshadowed in this post’s title but haven’t typed until now: writing.

Anticlimactic? Confused? It’s okay. Most people I speak with incorrectly equate writing with grammar. Why? Because our education system fails to teach what writing really is – writing is structured thinking.

Once we understand writing as structured thinking, we understand why writing is required for critical thinking and problem solving. Without writing, it’s impossible to dissect and structure a problem. It’s impossible to identify and close information gaps. It’s impossible to synthesize information within and across sources. It’s impossible to combine your understanding of sources, data, and analysis with your thoughts. It’s impossible to communicate your thoughts with others. Without writing, you cannot think clearly; you cannot be understood.

Gateway Skills

Writing along with algebra are what I call Gateway Skills. These two skills predict life outcomes, such as earning a living wage, more than any other in education.² ³ Why? It’s because they are generalizable and transferable to any subject and topic. They are precursors to the Life Skills of critical thinking and problem solving.

Unfortunately, 3 in 4 K-12 students struggle with one or both Gateway Skills.⁴ Again, the results are actually far worse. These standardized tests mostly test knowledge, not generalizable and transferable skills. The tests are built for rote learning – memorization and repetition. For writing, the tests often focus on mechanics (e.g., grammar, topic sentences), not for synthesizing within and across sources. For algebra, the tests often focus on solving pre-defined equations, not asking the student to read, interpret, and create the equations before solving. 

No wonder people struggle with critical thinking and problem solving – our education system largely ignores or is ineffective at teaching Gateway Skills. When I speak with district administrators, writing is rarely a priority. Reading and math are on standardized tests. Writing as structured thinking is not. Algebra as problem solving is not. Critical thinking and problem solving are heralded as hallmarks of a liberal arts education, but K-12 and higher education institutions don’t focus on these skills. We expect students to magically acquire these skills themselves.

Where we go from here

We need to focus on generalizable and transferable skills. After all, most knowledge students learn in school goes unused in their lives. For example, 3 in 4 college graduates end up in a career unrelated to their major.⁵ Students, very reasonably, dislike learning about things they’re uninterested in or don’t understand the value of. Rote learning – memorization and repetition – should not be the primary focus. Students don’t retain infrequently applied knowledge, nor does rote learning build generalizable and transferable skills they can apply elsewhere.

Now, how do we build generalizable and transferable Gateway and Life Skills? We need to start by revamping standardized testing. If tests don’t change, instruction won’t change. Eliminating standardized testing won’t do it. Testing generates incentives – teaching to the test. Incentives are good when the right ones are in place. We need to test for Writing to Learn skills, the ability to synthesize information across sources and clearly communicate and support one’s thoughts. We need to test problem solving by using word-based scenarios that require a student to truly understand the numbers and operations. If the tests evaluate critical thinking and problem solving, our education system will naturally gravitate to focusing on teaching the Gateway Skills (writing and algebra) required for critical thinking and problem solving.

Why don’t we test for Gateway and Life Skills today? It’s for two lousy reasons: fear and money. The fear is that students won’t perform well. Students struggle with tests of rote learning, so people believe students will fail at more complex tasks. I believe this premise is false (although they may struggle with more complex tasks at first). Building Gateway and Life Skills creates independent thinkers who truly understand and apply concepts across any subject or topic. Money-wise, testing rote learning through multiple choice is cheaper. Testing Gateway and Life Skills requires skilled graders. However, adding $25-50 in standardized test costs per student per year to improve outcomes is minuscule compared to the nearly $13,000 we spend per K-12 student per year⁶ to generate poor outcomes.

What you should do

Talk to your school leadership if you have kids or are a student. Get involved with your city’s school board. Advocate for Writing to Learn to be a central part of the curriculum. Be willing to accept seeming defeat in the short term (lower test scores) for long term gains (higher test scores and better life outcomes). Shoot me a note. The Prompt team and I are here for all of this. Our mission is to make people better writers.

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Citations

1. National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2019). (rep.). Job Outlook 2019. Retrieved from naceweb.org.

2. Berman, I. 2009. Supporting adolescent literacy achievement. Issue Brief, 1-15.

3. Murnane, R. J., Willette, J. B., & Levy, F. (1995) The Growing Importance of Cognitive Skills in Wage Determination. The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No.2, 251-266.

4. NAEP Report Cards - Home. (2011). The Nation's Report Card. Nationsreportcard.gov.

5. Abel, J. R., & Deitz, R. (2014). Agglomeration and Job Matching Among College Graduates. Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 587.

6. Bureau, U. S. C. (2020, May 11). Spending Per Pupil Increased for Sixth Consecutive Year. The United States Census Bureau. www.census.gov.