When you've organized your document and feel that your scaffold is strong,
then you need to go through your document sentence by sentence.
First ask yourself, have I said exactly what I mean to say?
Sometimes when we translate an idea from our mind to the page,
we lose a little bit of our clarity,
because we have context within our heads that our readers can't see.
So you have to put yourself in your reader's shoes and
really ask, if I'm coming to this document without the background that I have,
does this make sense?
Put yourself in your reader's shoes to always check for simplicity and clarity.
Let's look at an example of what I mean.
The sentence, while analyzing the data,
the market plan emerged, might make sense from the writer's perspective.
If you'd written it, you might be taking about how you're team's data analysis fed
the marketing plan.
But a new reader who doesn't have that context isn't going to
understand what you're saying.
They don't know who was doing the analyzing.
In fact, the sentence technically says that the marketing plan emerged while it
analyzed the data.
The sentence has a misplaced modifier and
a missing subject, as you've probably recognized.
You'd need to rewrite this for clarity.
The point I want to make in this video, however, is that you don't need to
understand grammatical niceties, if you can put yourself in your reader's shoes.
By reading through your reader's eyes,
you can understand that you actually haven't written what you mean.
And then you can correct it.
Instead of writing while analyzing the data, the market plan emerged,
you'd be much better off with, our team's analysis led to the marketing plan.
That tells your reader exactly what they need to know.
It gives them the context that you have.
Once you've asked yourself if you said exactly what you want to say,
then you want to go back through and read your sentence and
say, have I expressed myself as simply and straightforwardly as I can?
In a later lesson we'll cover generalities and
jargon which can definitely hurt your clarity.
But for now I don't want you necessarily to analyze the parts of speech.
I just want you to ask yourself if you said things
as straightforwardly as you possible can.
Let's take this sentence as an example.
Dave's band specializes in events of local scale that make use of extremely friendly
environments and blues and gospel influence.
Here's the band we're talking about.
I can just look at this sentence and know I need to make it easier to read.
I'm going to start by cutting and rearranging words.
Instead of, in events of local scale, can't I just say, in local events?
Then, blues and gospel influence, they really don't make sense where they are.
They should describe Dave's band.
So I'm going to cut influence, and move blues and gospel in front of band.
Our current version of the sentence is, Dave's blues and gospel band
specializes in local events that make use of extremely friendly environments.
This is better, but still clunky.
In particular, I'm thinking that extremely friendly environments
can be replaced by casual venues.
Couldn't I just cut events that make use of and just say, local casual venues.
It says the same thing with fewer words, and it's more clear.
Finally, specializes, that seems wrong for a band.
Shouldn't I say plays, isn't that simpler and more clear?
Then I can also cut in.
And what about blues and gospel?
Dave might disagree, but I think just blues will do.
Then, maybe I want to stress that the band is successful.
So I might want to add popular.
All right, here's our first sentence.
And then here's our rewrite.
I've cut my word count from 20 to 8 words, and I've still gotten my point across and
still represented the band.
Think about undertaking that process for a memo that's say 500 words long.
You might cut it by as much as a half.
Think about how much more impactful and easy to read your final document will be.
Revising for simplicity is such a useful editing tool.
It helps you improve your writing without your having to know a single grammatical
rule or really anything about syntax.
It's a powerful technique, but it does take practice.
The quiz that follows will help you get to work on this so
that you can apply it to your writing right away.