The Writing Guide

The writing process is four jobs, not one

The single most common cause of slow, painful writing is trying to plan, draft, revise, and edit all at once. Those are four different jobs that use four different parts of your attention, and doing them together means each interrupts the others. Separate them and each one gets faster.

1. Planning and outlining

Before you write a sentence, decide what the piece is trying to do and in what order. An outline does not have to be formal — a list of the points you want to make, in a sensible sequence, is enough. The goal is to make the structural decisions before you are also wrestling with wording, so drafting becomes a matter of filling in, not inventing. For longer or messier topics, a mind map helps you get every idea out of your head first and organise it into an outline afterward.

A workable outline answers three questions: what is the one thing a reader should take away, what are the three-to-six points that support it, and what order makes each point land. If you can answer those, the draft almost writes itself.

2. Drafting

Drafting is about volume, not quality. Your only job here is to get words onto the page, following your outline, without stopping to fix anything. Resist the urge to reread and polish the previous sentence — that switch into editing mode is what kills momentum. Write the whole section, or the whole piece, then stop. A rough draft that exists can be improved; a perfect paragraph that never got finished cannot.

Writing in timed sprints helps enormously here. A Pomodoro timer set to 25 minutes gives you a container for pure drafting with no editing allowed, and tracking your running total in a word counter turns an abstract task into a visible target.

3. Revising

Revising is structural work: does the piece say the right things in the right order? This is where you cut whole paragraphs that do not earn their place, move sections around, add the example that was missing, and make sure every part serves the one takeaway from your outline. Revising is best done a little cold — after a break, or the next day — because you need to read what you actually wrote, not what you meant to write.

4. Editing and proofreading

Editing is line-level work: word choice, sentence rhythm, concision, grammar, and finally typos. Do this last, once the structure is settled, so you are not polishing sentences you are about to delete. The self-editing checklist further down turns this phase into a concrete pass rather than a vague reread.

Word choice and concision

Clear writing is mostly a matter of using fewer, stronger words. Three habits do most of the work.

Cut filler words and empty phrases

Most first drafts are padded with words that add length but no meaning. Words like very, really, quite, just, actually, and basically can almost always be deleted with no loss. Whole phrases can be swapped for a single word:

Prefer strong verbs

A precise verb does the work of several vague words. She ran quickly becomes she sprinted; he looked at it carefully becomes he examined it. When you find yourself propping up a weak verb with an adverb, that is usually a signal that a stronger verb exists. The verb is the engine of a sentence — spend your energy there before you reach for modifiers.

Avoid nominalizations

A nominalization is a verb turned into a noun: make a decision instead of decide, provide an explanation instead of explain, conduct an investigation instead of investigate. They make prose feel bureaucratic and add words. When you spot a noun ending in -tion, -ment, or -ance paired with a limp verb like make, do, or have, try releasing the verb hiding inside it.

Sentence and paragraph structure

Vary sentence length

A page of sentences that are all the same length reads as a monotone drone. Mix short sentences with longer ones. A short sentence lands hard. Use it to make a point stick after a longer sentence has done the explaining. As a rough guide, keep your average sentence under about 20 words for general audiences, but let individual sentences range widely around that average — the variation is what creates rhythm.

One idea per paragraph

A paragraph is a unit of thought, not a unit of length. Each one should develop a single idea; when you move to a new idea, start a new paragraph. This is what makes writing scannable — a reader can follow the shape of your argument by skimming the first sentence of each paragraph.

Lead with topic sentences

The first sentence of a paragraph should tell the reader what the paragraph is about. This is the opposite of building to a reveal: in informational writing, put the point first and the support after. Readers skim, and a strong topic sentence lets them decide whether to slow down and read the rest. If you strung together just the opening sentence of every paragraph, they should read as a coherent summary of the whole piece.

Clarity and active voice

The active voice — the committee approved the budget — names who did what. The passive voice — the budget was approved by the committee — is longer, and it can hide the actor entirely (the budget was approved, by whom?). Default to the active voice: it is shorter, clearer, and more direct.

The passive voice is not wrong, and it has legitimate uses. Reach for it when the actor is unknown, unimportant, or deliberately withheld (the servers were breached overnight), or when the object is genuinely the topic of the sentence. The rule is simple: use the passive on purpose, not by accident. If you are unsure whether your prose is landing, run it through the readability guide, which scores sentence length and complexity and flags passages that are harder to read than they need to be.

Structure for different formats

The same principles apply everywhere, but the shape changes with the format.

Blog post

Lead with the answer or the payoff — online readers decide within seconds whether to stay. Use descriptive H2 and H3 headings so the piece is scannable, keep paragraphs to two or three sentences, and use lists and tables to break up dense information. Length should match the depth the topic needs; the table below shows typical ranges.

For more on how length relates to depth and search, see the word count guide.

Essay

Academic and argumentative essays follow a claim-first structure: an introduction that states your thesis, body paragraphs that each defend one supporting point with evidence, and a conclusion that ties the points back to the thesis. Every body paragraph should open with a topic sentence, present its evidence, and explain why that evidence supports the claim. The discipline is keeping each paragraph to one point and making the connective tissue between them explicit.

Email

Respect the reader's time. State your purpose in the first line — the ask or the key information — before any context. Keep the whole message to a few short paragraphs, use a specific subject line, and if you are asking for something, make the action and the deadline unmissable. A reader should be able to answer what do you want and by when after five seconds.

A practical self-editing checklist

Once your draft is written and revised, run it through this pass. Working from a checklist beats rereading and hoping problems jump out.

1. Read it aloud. Your ear catches clumsy rhythm, run-ons, and missing words that your eye glides over.
2. Cut the first paragraph. Drafts often warm up before getting to the point. Check whether the real opening is a sentence or two in.
3. Delete filler words. Search for very, really, just, actually, quite, and that, and remove every one you can spare.
4. Hunt the passive voice. Find was, were, been, and being, and switch to active unless the passive is deliberate.
5. Check paragraph focus. One idea each; split any paragraph that covers two.
6. Tighten long sentences. Any sentence over about 30 words is a candidate to split.
7. Check overused words. Run the text through a word frequency counter to spot a word or phrase you have leaned on too often.
8. Proofread last. Only after the words are settled, do a slow final pass for typos, punctuation, and spelling — ideally after a break so the text feels fresh.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Editing while drafting. The number one momentum killer. Draft first, polish later.
• Burying the point. Making the reader wade through setup before the payoff. Lead with the answer.
• Overusing adverbs and intensifiers. A strong verb beats a weak verb propped up with -ly words.
• Long, undifferentiated paragraphs. Walls of text signal to readers that skimming will not work, so they leave.
• Vague nouns and abstractions. Concrete words and examples are more persuasive than abstractions.
• Inconsistent tense or point of view. Pick a tense and a person, and hold them.
• Skipping the cold reread. Editing immediately after drafting means you read your intentions, not your words.

Tools that pair with this guide

• Word Counter — track word count, readability, and keyword density live as you draft.
• Mind Map — get ideas out of your head and into an outline before drafting.
• Pomodoro Timer — 25-minute focus sprints for distraction-free drafting.
• Word Frequency Counter — surface overused words and check keyword balance while editing.
• Reading Time Calculator — estimate how long your piece takes to read or present.
• The Readability Guide — score and improve how easy your prose is to read.