As your draft expands, your additions become more detailed. You can start splitting up paragraphs and inserting new ones, or dividing the draft into sections and chapters.

When the bricks are well made, the wall will be strong.

the Elaboration Likelihood Model, or ELM.[173] In the ELM, there are two routes to persuasion: the peripheral path and the central path. The difference between them is how much thought, or ‘elaboration’, people put into their decisions.

If your text isn’t working, your first thought may be that it lacks something. So you try to add in what’s missing. But sometimes, you can actually improve your text more by cutting it down.

The content of your writing is the words you put on the page. But just as important is the context in which those words are read – who the reader is, what they know, how they feel and what’s going on for them at the time

Good design and clear communication go hand in hand, because content and form are two sides of the same coin.

most buzzwords are big words for simple things, or new words for old things, or they just don’t mean anything at all. For example, ‘innovation’ is new ideas, ‘synergy’ is working together, and ‘leverage’ is just a fancy word for ‘use’.

By showing that you’ve thought about what the reader knows – and what they want to know, or need to know – you show that you care about them, and you’re here to help.

Ask yourself: What does my reader already know about my message? What do I want them to learn from my writing? How can I use what they already know to explain the things I want to say?