When rewriting, one of our goals is to be understood.

Readers don't assess the quality of nonfiction by its elegance nor its complexity. Instead, the quality of nonfiction emerges from:

How strong its ideas are x how much those ideas resonate

You get in the way of resonating when your ideas are unclear.

I like to write sentences that a thirteen-year-old could follow.

If they can understand, so can everyone else—including anyone who's skimming.

In speech, when you say something that doesn't resonate, you can add sentences to further explain your point. Don't do that in writing. If your sentence doesn’t resonate, you go back and rewrite it.

Writing is a process of deliberate thought curation—where each sentence can justify its inclusion in your final draft.

Succinctness—a lack of bloat—helps readers finish your post. What I've learned from asking a lot of friends for feedback is that readers often quit not because they dislike your ideas, but because they're bored.

Succinctness is a ratio. It's the percentage of significant thoughts out of all the thoughts communicated. A post can be 50,000 words, but... See more

Grammatical simplification such as this doesn't make your writing worse. The complexity of your writing should emerge from the strength of its ideas, not from how those ideas are worded.

Clarity and succinctness help ideas resonate. They reduce mental overhead so your ideas pop.

But what gets people reading in the first place? Intrigue , which is the other quality we rewrite for .

Now we rewrite sentence-by-sentence to remove unnecessary detail. The art of rewriting is the art of becoming self-aware about the purpose of every word.

After we remove unnecessary words, we'll rephrase what remains to be even more succinct.

For each section of an article, I will:

1. Read it.


2. Take an hour-long break.


3. Rewrite the section from memory—focusing only on the critical points.

The new version written from memory will take a more direct path toward what's important. The fluff falls away when you focus on effectively re-articulating yourself.

In short, your first draft is to extract novel ideas out of your brain. Your second draft is to rewrite those ideas so they resonate.