Keeping it simple
I attended an Editors Canada webinar today focused on Content Design — digital content being something I have been writing a lot of recently (and have written a lot of — like, a lot — in the past.
This webinar and some of the reading I’ve been doing, and conversations I’ve been having, have made me a reflect a bit on my writing journey.
I grew up in a very literate household. There were books everywhere. My mother has a Master’s in English Literature. So does my sister. My father taught journalism. (Fun fact: when I got both parents to edit something for me, my father would edit almost all the ‘that’s out and my mother would put them back in).
I was so desperate to write as a child, I would take notebooks and just scribble. Once I actually learned the alphabet, all bets were off. Somewhere downstairs I have a book I made of poetry about pigs, stapled together and complete with clip art. I loved pigs.
As I got older I developed style, created better prose and dreamed of the great Canadian novel.
Generational literature.
After high school, I went to journalism school and worked as a journalist and my writing was flipped on its head. I had to be specific and concise. Most important facts first and then the next, and then the next. You might get one column inch or 10.
And then I went from working as a journalist back to university, where I was supposed to write long academic papers. I once begged a TA to just accept my 4-page paper instead of asking me to resubmit in the 6–8 page range that was assigned. Why use a paragraph to make my point when one sentence is enough?
Now here we are in communications, writing different content for different audiences with different vocabulary and all the fun of being paid to write. And all the difficulty of explaining to non-writers that simplicity is key.
Simpler words, shorter sentences, easier paragraphs, more obvious choices. Welcome people, guide them, don’t try to make yourself sound smart. Talk to them, not at them.
Tell them what they need to know, not what you want them to hear.
I never knew, when I was penning pig poetry with crayons, that I would love learning about writing as much as I love the practice itself.