How I discovered the secret sauce

- While I was an editor at The Wall Street Journal not too many years ago, my bosses in Hong Kong asked me if I wanted to help the paper's reporters and editors across Asia to improve their news writing skills. Now, I jumped at the chance to indulge two of my favorite passions, teaching and traveling. In this new exciting role, I'd get the chance to share my writing tips and strategies with dozens of my colleagues across the entire Asia-Pacific region. What a wonderful opportunity that was. It was a mission that would take me to Tokyo, to Bangkok, Seoul, and elsewhere where I'd sit with reporters, discuss their writing challenges, and let them look over my shoulder as I edited their article. I'd also hold workshops where I would explain my writing techniques to them. As I became more and more familiar with my method of writing, I realized something quite fascinating. I realized that although I'd often make many changes to a reporter's article, I was really only making four types of changes. I would make the writing more simple than before where perhaps it had been long-winded or unnecessarily complicated. Secondly, I'd make the writing more clear, say, if it was imprecise or murky for some reason or other. Third, I'd make the writing more elegant if to me it felt somehow clunky or disorganized or that it didn't flow well. And fourth, I'd make the writing more evocative, where basically I felt that it'd been too dry or a bit boring. And that truly seemed to be all that I ever did. I'm serious. Those were the only four things I found myself doing to an article to make it read better. I just made the writing more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative, and nothing more. That's why I came to call this eventually the secret sauce of good writing, because these were the only four ingredients that I needed to make any piece of nonfiction writing sparkle. Again, simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. And this right here is the first powerful writing perspective that I'm going to teach you. Now as it happens, this is probably the most useful of all the perspectives for improving your writing quickly and dramatically. And by the end of this lesson, you'll have a very good idea of what this secret sauce is and also what it can do for your writing. Again, to reassure you, this secret sauce will work on articles, blog posts, eCommerce scripts, sales emails, marketing copy, and any type of business correspondence. So don't make the mistake of thinking that the four ingredients are going to only be useful for news writing. Simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness are in fact the fundamental design principles that I use for writing or editing any type of nonfiction writing. And that's the best way to think of them, in fact, as design principles. So here again are the four ingredients in my secret sauce: simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. And I want you to know that in reality, it's hard to separate out the role of each ingredient. But the following breakdown may help you to understand a little better why each ingredient is so important for enhancing the quality of your writing. By simplifying your writing to the highest degree, you'll make it more engaging to readers as it will become lighter, faster, and punchier. The second ingredient, clarity, basically makes your writing easy to understand and follow along to. It's the ingredient that leads to better comprehension of your content. Elegance is the ingredient that makes your writing basically flow better. It gives your writing more order, rhythm, balance, poise, and gracefulness. And finally, evocativeness is the ingredient that makes your writing more stimulating and enthralling and captivating. And here's an easy way to remember the impact of each ingredient in the secret sauce. Simplicity makes your writing ping. Clarity makes it ring. Elegance makes it sing. And evocativeness makes it zing. Now, I want to just quickly prove the power of this little formula to you by showing you how significantly it can improve even a single sentence. Just take a look at this passage on the screen, some version of which I often get my students to edit before delving into the tactics. It was indicated to the president by his chief advisor that it should be attempted to formulate a decision to act at the earliest opportunity, in the best interests of circumventing what might otherwise result in the country flowering into embarking on a prolonged, extended, and exorbitant military conflagration. Now, pause the video and take a moment to edit that sentence using just the four ingredients that I mentioned in whatever way you understand them at this time. At this stage, I want you to focus on nothing more than making the writing more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative. Okay, well, here's what I got after applying the four ingredients to this rather unwieldy and murky sentence. The president's chief advisor urged him to act quickly to avert a long, costly war. Now, I hope you got something similar, and hopefully even better than that. Either way, I want you to just note that this new sentence is a great deal more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative than the original. Here's another one to quickly try. It was the view of the vast majority of the directors on the advisory board of the company, Lectern Inc, after a vote, with only one exception, that it would be of the opinion that punitive measures be directed at the chief executive, Mike Fleming, for the numerous things that he has done badly for the company. Is that simple, clear, elegant, and evocative? No, right? So pause this and try to make that horrible sentence, which is flawed in so many ways, as simple, clear, elegant, and evocative as you can. Now, there are so many different ways to improve that sentence to be sure, but here's one way to make it more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative, in my view. Lectern's advisory board voted almost unanimously to punish CEO Mike Fleming for his repeated failures. That's much better than the original one, right? The sentence is punchier and more engaging as a result of being simplified in various ways. It's more crisp thanks to being much clearer than the original. It flows better as a result of being more elegantly written and it's also more stimulating or evocative thanks to the use of some dramatic language like punish and repeated failures and things and even the use of dashes in that way. Now again, if this is the impact that the secret sauce can have on a single sentence, imagine what it could do for an entire piece of writing. Well, in the coming lectures in this section, I'll be showing you several ways in which you can make your writing more simple, clear, elegant, and evocative. And you'll therefore quickly come to see what a difference that applying this formula can make to the readability and the overall quality of your writing. However, I need you to be aware that while it's helpful in general to try to optimize the simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness of your writing, you should always consider how much of each ingredient is suitable or necessary for the particular thing that you are writing. Indeed, sometimes you'll have to seek a balance between one ingredient and another, or one tactic and another. Similarly, a legal document that you were drafting may not need to be especially evocative. So you may not focus too heavily on making it so. In fact, you may need to deliberately make it not so, otherwise it might read more like a blog post and no one might, say, take it seriously. Indeed, in a legal document, the emphasis on clarity would be likely vastly more than on any of the other three ingredients. In fact, it would usually need to be exceptionally clear even if that meant repeating words a lot or stating things in a bit of a clunky or inelegant way. And what I'm really pointing to here is that there may be times when these four ingredients clash with each other, where you're basically forced to compromise in order to better fulfill your objective. But the end result of any piece of writing is in fact always going to be some kind of artistic balancing of the four ingredients appropriately. And that's why rather than throwing all the four ingredients into the pot and hoping the dish tastes nice, I'm going to encourage you to view yourself more like a master chef carefully blending and balancing the ingredients in the way that achieves the best flavors for the particular dish that you are preparing. Now, this may all sound a bit abstract to you right now, especially if you're totally new to my writing training, but please don't worry. By the end of the next few sections where I'll be explaining each of the four ingredients one by one, what I'm saying now should all make perfect sense to you. Okay, so let's get to it. In the next lesson, we'll begin by exploring the powerful ingredient of simplicity, the first ingredient in the secret sauce, and we'll be asking ourselves one question: how do you make your writing more simple so that it becomes more light, more fast, and more punchy?