At Telegraph Editorial, our mission is to improve the clarity of your voice and your message.
We hew to four simple rules for good prose, with profound thanks to Dr. Strunk:
One sentence should convey one, and only one, idea. This rule guards against both over- and under-loading your writing. Every writer in a specialized field has already encountered enough unreadable, sprawling sentences to last a lifetime. Stand out among your peers with a clearer, more confident voice by using fewer qualifiers. And on the other end of the spectrum, don’t tolerate cognitively blank spaces in your writing. Yes, you may technically have the necessary subject, verb, and punctuation, but filler is a crime against intellect. If you can’t locate an idea in each sentence, your readers certainly won’t be able to.
The paragraph is the unit of composition. This means that, at any given point in the drafting process, the writer’s goal is to craft a clearly delineated, complete paragraph. The structural goal of the sentence is to contribute to building a readable and easily understood paragraph. The two chief reasons for this framing are to improve the manageability of writing long-form pieces, and to improve the manageability of reading long-form pieces. Anyone who has ever written a whitepaper or dissertation knows the danger to sensibility that lurks in trying to conceive of the whole document at once. Dismiss thinking of your piece as a monolith, and truly excellent writing can come into reach. It doesn’t take Shakespeare to fit five or six moving parts together. Give it a shot and see how good your paragraphs can be.
Don’t make it any harder for your reader than it absolutely has to be. Writers working with big, complicated ideas can make a lot of mistakes that block their readers from understanding. Poor grammar and cloudy syntax are the usual suspects, but inconsistent use of terminology, poetic overreach, and aimless essay-planning usually work their way into the mix, too. While there is certainly a reasonable threshold of effort to expect from a reader, it is incumbent on the writer to be vigilant about cleaning up as many of the problems as possible.
Be Interesting! This rule is the easiest to articulate and understand, but the hardest to apply consistently. Be honest with yourself when you read over your work: Is every sentence interesting? Would you want to read it if you weren’t forced to?
So that’s the plan. You bring as many brilliant ideas to the table as you can, and we’ll help you satisfy all four rules. You’ll be astonished at how good your work sounds when you read the finished product.