Episode
3 Ways To Make Your Writing Clearer
- Podcast
- Harvard Business Review
- Published
- Jun 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 290
- Processing state
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- https://traffic.megaphone.fm/VG6686650671.mp3
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Summary
3 Ways To Make Your Writing Clearer 3 Nov 2021 --- If your message isn’t clear, changing a word here or there won’t help. You need these 3 strategies to get to the heart of the problem. 00:00 Writing is hard, especially under deadline 00:20 Sentence-level corrections won't save you if your message isn't clear 00:31 Cut the "since the dawn of time" opening 01:03 Write claim-based topic sentences 01:48 Make sure people are doing thing in your sentences ... 02:18 ... unless you don't want them to be doing things 02:50 Summary Next time you finish a document with a few minutes to spare, don’t squander your time editing with minor sentence-level revisions — changing a word here, cutting a word there (and then putting it back). You should certainly spell-check and proofread every document before you click submit. But if your message isn’t as clear as it needs to be, changing the word “purchase” to “buy” isn’t going to help. Instead, focus on the big picture with these three strategies: 1) Cut the “since the dawn of time” opening and get right to the point. 2) Turn those descriptive topic sentences into topic sentences that make claims. 3) Make sure people are doing things in your sentences — unless you don’t want them to be doing things. If you get in the habit of using these three strategies, you should find you won’t need to do as much last-minute editing in the future. Based on the HBR article by Jane Rosenzweig: https://hbr.org/2020/04/3-ways-to-make-your-writing-clearer She has more tips at her "Writing Hacks" newsletter: http://writinghacks.substack.com/ This video is co-produced with @Emeritus . You can find more co-productions from HBR and Emeritus on the Emeritus app: https://emrt.us/HarvardBusinessReview Follow us: https://hbr.org/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/…