The Art of Writing is in the Rewriting

“Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost.” ~ William Zinsser.

What separates good writing from generic ones? Rewriting.

No matter what you think about your first draft, it’s far from perfect. Even when it looks perfect, it can greatly benefit from a rewrite. 

It’s this knowledge that puts good writers at advantage. Experience forewarns them: do not fall in love with your first draft. It’s only your 3rd or even 4th re-edit that makes your writing worth reading. 

It’s exactly here that amateur writers fail too. They think their first draft was born perfect. They love the sound of their own words, the prose of their own writing. They conclude, wrongly, that their writing is too good to be mangled any further. 

There’s also this misplaced notion that rewriting is an assault on the authenticity that animated the first draft. We’ll come to that later. 

At this point, you must realize that your first draft is simply the compilation of all related thoughts put together in one place. The logic is not air-tight. The flow is not seamless. The distractions are too many. The focal point is all over the place. Your argument does not automatically follow. 

Based on my decades of writing experience, here are a few thoughts on how to rewrite.

Mistaking Relevance for Logical Continuity

In long form writing, it’s vital to not confound relevance with causation.

A fact could be relevant to the topic being explored. All the same, it could still be inconsequential to the case being built.

Starting to write without an end-purpose can cause the writing to go haywire. However, even relevant details, unless structured, do not add to the article’s purpose. 

Therefore, it’s better to start with an outline that captures the essence (not details) of the article. And, leave a little room to maneuver for details. 

Remember the Indian mass movies of yore that had everything fall in place towards the end?

Long form writing is no different. It’s only more important here.

Every piece of the writing must justify its presence by contributing towards your end-purpose. 

Use dictionary, not thesaurus

When we rewrite, we tend to use thesaurus to pick better words. 

But this could lead to unintended ambiguity.

Take, for instance, the idea of replacing “unclear” with “nebulous”. If you check thesaurus, you would think they’re interchangeable. 

However, if we look through a dictionary, the distinction becomes clear. 

Let us see how Cambridge Dictionary defines them:

• Unclear: Not obvious or easy to see or know

• Nebulous: (especially of ideas) not clear and having no form:

Clearly:

• *When people are “unclear”, their statement could be interpreted in more than one way. 

• *When something is “nebulous”, it’s too cloudy to allow for any interpretation at all. 

Both are not the same. 

The next time you rewrite, use thesaurus if you wish to. But always follow it up with a dictionary.

Put yourself in your readers’ shoes

Seeing salespeople have a jolly call with customers, many tend to believe that sales is easy. 

Nobody questions the difficulty involved in functions like coding, engineering, testing etc., because the difficulty is considered self-evident. 

This happens because salespeople’s “art is hidden in plain sight”. Good writing is similar! 

Since functional writing (like emails, chats etc.) is integral to modern workers' jobs, it's assumed they already know how to write.

But there's a huge gap between writing and 'writing well'. The advice "write like you talk" falls flat on most occasions. When you talk, the listener can interrupt in real-time for clarifications. But when you "write like you talk", a reader unable to follow you will just withdraw attention.

Which means the writer must write in a way that anticipates the readers' context and addresses them preemptively. 

Respect the readers’ time

“This meeting could have been an email”.

In the early days of pandemic-enforced remote work, people discovered that the purpose of most meetings could be realized with an email. However, far from receding, the number of (virtual) meetings only increased.

Why?

I think this is largely because writing clearly involves more time and effort than people bargain for.

A few weeks ago, a friend texted me with a request for a call. Our busy schedules meant that it was long before we could talk. It took him about 40-minutes to explain how he needed me to help him on a particular task.

Because he didn’t take time to structure his thoughts and write them down in a proper sequence, he let go of weeks' time. But, given the zero-sum nature of these interactions, one of us had to expend more time.

Email enables people, not in the same (virtual) room at the same time, to collaborate. This form of asynchronous communication must be capitalized on to the hilt. Instead, we squander away the opportunity by insisting on using new-age apps in the most old fashioned way. 

Put simply: 

• If you invest 15-mins to make your email's case clear, your recipient will comprehend it in 5-mins.

• If, however, you write your heart out in 5-mins, your recipient will need 15-mins to make sense of it.

Ultimately, the time spent on writing and reading is a zero-sum game.