Writing · The method
Communication is an act of translation
Most communication work focuses on the sender: the message, the channel, the schedule. I design for the receiver: what the reader already knows, what they need, and what they will understand on first read.
The claim
A message that does not land did not happen. If the reader does not understand it, the communication failed, no matter how well it was written. I judge writing by what the reader takes away, not by what the writer intended.
The mechanism
A picture shows everything at once. Words do not. Words arrive one at a time, in a fixed order, and the reader assembles their meaning piece by piece. That is how reading works, and every rule I follow comes from it.
The rules
First: use fewer words.
Every word is one more piece the reader has to hold while assembling the meaning. A forty-word sentence asks the reader to hold forty pieces in order, and some get dropped. Shorter sentences lose fewer pieces.
Second: clarity beats brevity.
Cutting words is only safe until the cut creates a second possible meaning. A sentence that can be read two ways forces the reader to choose, and some will choose wrong. When that happens, I put the word back. A word that removes ambiguity is never extra.
Third: judge every sentence against a specific reader.
The same sentence can be clear to one reader and meaningless to another, because clarity depends on what the reader already knows. Before writing, I answer two questions: what does this reader know already, and how fast are they reading? A recruiter giving a page six seconds and a specialist studying it line by line need different versions of the same facts.
The test
After writing, I test each sentence with four questions. Does it have a job? Would a reader with no context understand it on first read? Could one stronger word replace three? If I deleted it, would anything be lost? Sentences that fail get cut or rewritten. This page took the same test.
Where it started
I started asking these questions in college, in a research project on news coverage of the Zika virus: how word choice shaped what the public understood about their own health risk. The same facts, worded differently, produced different understanding in the people reading them. Every rule above is a response to that finding.
The samples
The same facts, written for four readers
One scanning electron microscope, explained for the general public, a student, a materials scientist, and the microscopist who runs one daily. Written for this portfolio.
02The challenge got everything it asked for
A personal essay. In 2016 I argued in print that the NHL coach's challenge should be fixed, not killed. The league fixed it. Ten years later, this is what fixing it cost.
Next
The person behind the method, and how to reach him, is under About.
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