How to rewrite bad writing 👇

After rewriting 400,000 words on my site...

Advice for blog posts, tweets, emails:

Great authors’ first drafts are bad—no better than yours.

However, they aggressively *rewrite* those drafts.

Your first draft is for messily generating ideas.

Your second draft is for identifying the best ideas then making them resonate.

The enemy of rewriting is being precious about what you originally said and how you originally said it.

You need to be willing to destroy.

Part 1. Write to be understood

Readers don't assess the quality of nonfiction by its elegance nor its complexity.

Instead, they assess:

[How strong your ideas are] x [how intuitively they understand them]

Unclear sentences distract from that understanding.

Technique #1: Use simple sentences

Write sentences that a thirteen-year-old could follow.

If they can understand you, so can everyone else.

That isn't to say children should understand the details.

Rather, children must be able to follow the logic of every argument.