Here’s a summary of how to write clear, concise, and coherent prose. For brevity, this section tells you what to do without showing you how. For demonstrations and examples of the suggestions listed here, see the references cited at the end, especially Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams, whose work is informed by research in linguistics and psychology.
When faced with unfamiliar concepts or arguments, readers try to create a holistic picture of it — or, more formally, a mental or cognitive model. They attempt to attach the unfamiliar aspects of it to things they already know. They want to know what it is, what it does, how it works, and why. What requirements does it entail? What use cases does it serve? What problems does it solve? Why should they care?
So: How can you relate new information to something readers already know? The key is to present critical information in a way that creates global coherence. But how do you do that?
Write sentences that are simple, clear, and direct: Introduce the ideas in a paragraph with a short, crisp sentence that goes straight to the point. Present known or given information at the beginning of a sentence, and put new or unknown information toward the end of a sentence. Managing the flow of information to create global coherence and a mental model trumps favoring the active voice.
Being direct means this: Do not back into your ideas. Instead, place the key point at the beginning, not the middle, of a paragraph. Use concrete, not abstract, nouns. Pair concrete nouns with short, precise, visceral verbs. Although clarity is a function of interpretation, not a property of text, readers interpret text as clear when the subject and its verb are close together, when the subject is an agent – a user, actor, character, or system — and when that agent performs actions expressed by verbs.
Cut clutter: Remove unnecessary words. Don’t state what your reader can easily infer. Hypothesize accurately about what your reader knows so that you can cut excessive detail; the level of detail you should provide depends on how much your readers already know.
Move from general to specific. Be specific. Express coordinate ideas in similar form. Set competing ideas or concepts in sharp relief. Examine the natural hierarchy of your text — its referents, antecedents, discourse topics, arguments, narratives, timelines, plots, and themes — and use that knowledge to avoid repetition and redundancy.
Create coherence by tightly fusing your ideas together with words that create cohesion or, better, concepts that form logical transitions. Make sure that the entire text coheres: Every aspect of a text should contribute to a unified, coherent whole.
In matters of style, good prose is transparent: The reader sees only the ideas or concepts unfold on the page without being distracted by text that stands out because it violates the standards of professional publishing, which readers are tacitly used to, or because it triggers reactivity. Clean-looking material is easier and faster to read.
Want more information and examples? Here are some books that describe evidence-based practices for editing word usage, syntax, sentence construction, and structural organization to produce clear, concise writing.
Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (or one of its variants), by Joseph M. Williams.
Stylish Academic Writing, by Helen Sword.
Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers, by Scott Norton.
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.
The Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker, who also supplies a quotation to end this guide with a reminder to balance a focus on style with more important things in life:
“And for all the vitriol brought out by matters of correct usage, they are the smallest part of good writing. They pale in importance behind coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness. If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.”