energies on a major document or project or speech that will make a difference.

If you have distilled your thinking to its essence, you will probably be able to express it in simple words.

The only way some people know you is through your writing. It can be your most frequent point of contact, or your only one, with people important to your career — major customers, senior clients, your own top management. To those women and men, your writing is you. It reveals how your mind works. Is it forceful or fatuous, deft or clumsy, crisp or

The old rule is simple: Don’t use “like” in any case where “as if” or “as though” would fit comfortably.

What you write should sound just like you talking when you’re at your best — when your ideas flow swiftly and in good order, when your syntax is smooth, your vocabulary accurate, and afterward you think that you couldn’t possibly have put things any better than you did.

it would have seemed both natural and literate. The old rule is simple: Don’t use “like” in any case where “as if” or “as though” would fit comfortably.

Three major articles start at the top of the front page of every issue of The Wall Street Journal. The first paragraphs of these articles are never more than three sentences long. Many paragraphs contain only a single sentence. The first sentences themselves are crisp and compact: It all began to crumble the afternoon Mom’s Best Cookies, Inc.,

Take the time to boil down what you want to say, and express it confidently in simple, declarative sentences. Remember the man who apologized for writing such a long letter, explaining that he didn’t have time to write a short one.

another advantage of the active voice is that it tends to push you to decide precisely what you want to say, to be more specific.