For a long time (by which I mean 5 years, as I’m 22), I used to think good writing was about sounding intelligent. Long sentences, layered ideas, plenty of context so that nobody could possibly misunderstand me. Then I started reading beasts like Naval Ravikant, Ray Dalio, and Will Larson and noticed something uncomfortable in me: the writers I admired most used fewer words than I did to say more interesting things. That was a humbling thing to sit with when I had spent much time treating paragraph length as a sign of thoroughness.
The real lesson was there for me at work. Every ticket I write at Metris needs to get someone from point A to point B with as little friction as possible. Thanks to my mentor Brian Muyambo, I learned that to get a job done, I must express my task with a balanced mix of clarity and thoroughness. That single thing taught me more about communication than any book on rhetoric, which says something unfortunate about how much I spent on books.
I’ve realized that rambling is a thinking problem disguised as a writing problem. When I catch myself writing four sentences to make one point, it’s because I haven’t decided whatever the hell I think the point is (yet). The writing is doing the work my thinking should have done before I opened the document. Clarity on the page starts with clarity in my own head, and unfortunately or fortunately, no amount of elegant prose will cover for its absence.
The test I use now is: Can I read this back to someone and have them understand it on the first pass, as if they are a 10 year old? Now, our engineers are not 10 (yet) but it still matters to think of good writing as an expression in the simplest, most distilled form of communication.
Not after a “what I mean is,” on the first. If the answer is no, I haven’t written anything but just made a bunch of noise.