Valuable writing

Note

This is all stolen or paraphrased from the video LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively by Larry McEnerney, which is also recommended in our Improving your writing page.

People often focus on rules when defining good writing. They say things like "Is it clear?", or "is it persuasive?" But the only thing that really matters is, "is your writing valuable?" Some writing is, and some isn't.

That's not saying that the rules aren't important. Your writing needs to be clear. It needs to be organized and it needs to be persuasive. These are probably the rules that your teacher focused on.

But it’s much more important that your writing is valued by the reader. Often the person reviewing your writing is your boss or your editor or your client, and often you can get caught up trying to make sure that that person is happy with it. But normally they aren't the person who is going to get value out of it, and you need to continually remind yourself of who the real audience is.

People will still read valuable writing that is not clear and not organized and not persuasive. But if your writing has all of that and it’s useless then overall it’s still useless. So when reviewing your writing, ask after every sentence "is this valuable?" Once you've got a valuable piece of writing, you can always add clarity, but the opposite is a lot harder.

What makes writing valuable?

One person could read an article and find it life changing, while another reader might close it after reading the first sentence. So your writing will only ever be valuable in the context of an intended reader. It's always hard to predict whether a given reader will find value in a specific article, but here are some general guidelines to keep in mind.

• Tell the reader that they're wrong:. "You probably think X, but actually Y is true" is nearly always a valuable statement if you're correct that the reader has a specific misconception. The easiest way to do this is by keeping track of your own misconceptions. Before starting an article, you probably have some assumptions. As you build something or do research, those assumptions might be corrected. It's easy to forget the assumptions once you've done the building or research, so keep notes. Then write the article that you would have wanted to read before you started.
• Make statements that a reasonable person could strongly disagree with. If you tell someone that it's important to consider all the options carefully before choosing a way forwards that aligns with their goals, that's probably not very controversial. It's also not interesting or valuable. If you tell people to choose Nginx in front of a REST-ful API for 95% of cases, that could be interesting. Of course, your controversial opinions should be backed by reasoning or demonstrations - anyone can start flamewars on controversial topics, so it's not enough to be controversial, but it is often a key ingredient.
• Show, don't tell. There's no shortage of content out there telling you that X,Y,Z is the best thing since sliced bread. Instead of telling readers that something is the future, show a short demonstation using a gif, code sample, or explanation. Especially if you can compare it to the 'bad' way of doing something, you can convince your readers of your opinion without using any persuasive or marketing language.
• Ask, "so what?" after each paragraph. It's easy to add sentences that are bland, uninteresting, or cliched to an article. After reading a sentence, is a reader likely to care? Is the information likely new to the reader? Something like "it's important to note that you need to understand and comply with relevant regulations" is probably not interesting or new information and can probably be cut.