All writing disseminates information—even bad writing. Good writing does something more.

Good writing teleports a person. The reader, yes, but also the writer.

What do I mean? When you read good writing, you sense the writer’s presence. You may be reading words written ten decades ago, by someone writing in Sleepy Eye Minnesota or Butternuts New York, yet that person seems so near, right in the room with you, as you consume their written thoughts.

How does one do that? How does one transport a sense of their human presence to the readers of their writing?

Fourteen months ago I embarked on a journey to learn this delightful sorcery. This quest sparked a surge of learning I’m still processing.

Only a certain kind of writing allows for this sort of conjuring. Here are two principles that have moved me closer to my goal:

1. No volunteer sentences.

For a reader to sense my presence in my writing, then my writing must be crafted carefully and intentionally by me. This means:

• No flow-state writing
• No clichés
• No jargon

The best bartenders serve sober. Likewise, the best writers write self-possessed, with intention and care. This means repudiating the romance of writing. All those pictures of geniuses at their typewriters and keyboards, lost in the flurry of ferocious output, riding a flow of prose erupting from some subterranean place within them—what do these images do to our expectations as writers?

I admit, of all the idols of writing nostalgia, the dream of flow enchanted me most. Fingers slapping keys like hail on tin roofs, words streaming down screens, page-after-page of easy prose, oh how wonderful that seems. To relax the critical mind, to open up that cognitive spigot, to not even know what you will write until you are writing it, what a thrill.

Yet, that’s exactly the problem with flow-state writing. Where does it come from? I used to get a kick out of writing things that surprised me. Now I see, if the prose surprises me, than I am not truly its source. And if I am not the source, whatever presence a reader might feel, it won’t be my presence.

So now when I write something unexpected, I look at it with suspicion. Maybe it’s a gift from my muse or maybe it’s a clue to a crime. Perhaps my muse has evicted me from my own writing.

My readers can only sense me in my writing to the extend that I am truly the source of my prose. They must come to trust that I’ve thought carefully about every part of every sentence, that I’ve thoughtfully considered every word, and the order of every thought.

Cliché threatens this entire project. Cliché makes writing easy, but inherently impersonal. By definition, cliché could be from anyone. As Verlyn Klinkenborg puts it, cliché is “the debris of someone else’s thinking.”

Oh, and when you write about something academics care about, look out! You are entering a jungle overrun with jargon, a wilderness of passwords and secret handshakes, where every sentence is policed for compliance to the meticulous linguistic expectations of the inner circle.

But then one day, with the sun bright and with birds chirping, you realize jargon is simply the peer-reviewed “debris of someone else’s thinking.” Academic jargon is simply double-stamped-and-triple-validated-cliché.

No wonder academic writing is such toil to read. Academics don’t write to delight or enlighten you. They write to please an institution.

2. Trust the reader.

The more your writing accommodates the needs of your reader the less your writing will reflect your unique self.

Over the years I’ve heard many publishers and editors coach writers to “write at the 6th grade level.”

They have good reasons for this. Writers left unsupervised can get drunk on their own writing. They tangle themselves in their own technical spaghetti, until reading their prose feels like chipping through a concrete wall with a toothpick.

And yet, “make it simple” isn’t the best solution. The diagnosis is right—technical language pummels readers’ brains in slow motion with a baseball bat—but the prescription is wrong—”dumb it down.”

I say this because some of the best writing I’ve ever read tackles profound and complicated subjects.

What makes writing excellent, even with a difficult subject, is not simplicity but clarity.

Clarity means carefully selecting the perfect word—not necessarily the simplest word—and putting it in the perfect place. Clarity means taking the care to focus on saying exactly what you want to say, and nothing more. That means being conscientious of exactly what your sentences say, what they don’t say, and what they imply. One problem with simple words is they often have the greatest breadth of meaning. So they might make a sentence simpler, but only by making it less clear.

Clarity also means doing away with all of the extraneous infrastructure we torture readers with. Topic sentences, summary sentences, transition sentences—good writing needs none of it. If you write with clarity, and you write conscientiously, the next sentence you read emerges naturally from the previous. Something in the first sentence begets the content of the next.

It makes me think of those little paintings at museums. I mean the ones that are about the size of an iPhone, but then also sit in a frame the size of a king sized mattress.

Good writing needs no decorative frames. Strive for clarity, write cohesively, and trust the reader to follow your thought.

My philosophy degree left me with a ferocious addiction to logical indicators:

In fact.
Indeed.
On the one hand.
On the other hand.
Therefore.
However.
In one respect.
Of course.
Thus.

Reading Verlyn Klinkenborg was like an intervention. Logical indicators, like the ones I’ve abused, “insist upon logic whether it exists or not.” He goes on to say that this type of writing turns out to be “little more than an obsession with transition and the scattering of rhetorical tics—overused, nearly meaningless words and phrases.”

The better I get at making arguments without these crutches, the more my writing feels uniquely mine.

The publishing industry will continue pumping out processed books, pre-chewed prose, writing with training wheels and guardrails.

Me, I like the idea of doing my very best to write with clarity, then trusting my reader to grasp my work. Trust the reader, then write so that they come to trust you. What do they trust you for? They trust that you care about each word and each sentence they read, that you invested your mind into every line written, that your observations are yours and not an echo from someone else. If you haven’t invested yourself in each part of your writing, why should they? And if you must write difficult things, they come to trust that your writing will reward them for whatever struggle they face.

Even though readers can look up words easier now than ever before, some readers will abandon your work at the first sight of a big word. They’ve been coddled and baby-talked for so long, now they’ve come to expect others to think for them, to process ideas for them, to extract life applications for them, and to make sure no idea will challenge them or create any discomfort for them.

Me, I’ve decided to let those readers go. Countless writers will appear, eager to goo-goo-ga-ga them back to numb comfort. A work will curate the right audience. I’d rather produce good writing for a smaller audience than writing that patronizes readers with simplified pseudo-thought.

It’s interesting. I’ve slowed my writing down a great deal as I’ve taken more care in my prose. Despite that, I’ve somehow produced more writing in the past year than I have in the previous five.

If you want to go deeper with some of these ideas, here are the books that have inspired me most:

“Several Short Sentences on Writing,” by: Verlyn Klinkenborg

“First You Write a Sentence,” by: Joe Moran.