How to write plainly for a reader who knows nothing

1 The bottom line

Write for a stranger who knows nothing: use short everyday words, name who did what, and cut every word that does no work. A reader who has to reread is your failure, and unclear prose often signals unclear thinking.

2 Key takeaways

• Write for a specific reader who knows nothing about your subject. Experts forget what it was like not to know, and that forgetting is what makes writing opaque.
  • Mitch Albom48:57 pictured a grandmother in North Carolina who had never seen a Detroit game, so a .333 hitter became a man who does something good one time in three.
  • Derek Thompson25:28 writes for someone as simple minded as he was six hours ago.
• Choose short, everyday words over long, fancy ones. Easy prose leaves the reader more attention for your ideas.
  • Ward Farnsworth3:37 notes that "Let there be light" is eleven Saxon words, and Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" passage runs thirty-two in a row.
• Cut jargon and acronyms, or define them the first time. Insider language shuts out everyone else, and it often hides how little is inside it.
  • Francine Prose9:32 had students translate jargon into plain English, and the passages collapsed "like this big meringue."
  • Peter Attia1:04:18 dropped "dot product of lifespan and health span" for "a function of" them, because readers would need the dot product explained.
• Write about people doing things, with strong verbs. Readers can picture an actor and an action, but not a concept.
  • Johnny Harris22:22 writes "they fled" instead of "leading to the migration of 6,000 Mormons."
• Cut every word that is not working, but do not confuse concise with short. Padding costs the reader attention, and over-compression costs them meaning.
  • Harry Dry57:01 likes Kaplan's Law of Words: any words that aren't working for you are working against you.
  • Morgan Housel38:59 says concise does not necessarily mean short.

you don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas.

Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters

2.1 Start with the reader who knows nothing

Most unclear writing comes from forgetting what the reader does not know.

• Picture one specific stranger and write to them. Mitch Albom48:57 did this with a grandmother who wanted to follow his column
  • Pick human themes and translate numbers into plain terms. says diehard fans will read you anyway, so the real work is reaching everyone else.
  • Try a clever five-year-old with no background. Lulu Cheng Meservey36:57 says this forces you to fill in blanks, use short words and simple sentences, and not assume the reader is on your side.
  • Michael Mauboussin7:17 tests a draft against two readers. A high schooler should get the basic ideas, and a sophisticated finance professor should still find something of interest.
  • Derek Thompson25:28 started at The Atlantic knowing nothing about economics. He writes only when he can explain the subject, and he keeps his earlier ignorance in mind.
• Subtract what you know to find the reader's starting point. Steven Pinker3:02 calls the curse of knowledge the biggest flaw in writing
  • Ask what the reader knows and does not know. says the flaw shows up as acronyms, jargon and abstractions.
  • Ask what the story is and what an outsider would find interesting. Brie Wolfson9:37 did this when helping people write Stripe shipped emails.
  • Johnny Harris1:17:40 says every project hits a moment when it is not as cool as it was at the start. He guards his early curiosity and imagines how he would have wanted the topic explained to him.
• Assume the reader is smart but lacks context. Tim Mackie and Jon Collins1:03:45 quote Cleo Abram
  • People overestimate how much context others have and underestimate their intelligence. Do the opposite: lay out the context, then trust the reader to follow.
  • Never talk down. Jon Yaged47:15 says the common trait of children's creators is that they respect kids.
  • Johann Hari34:15 writes for his grandmother, who left school at 13. The worst thing a reader could say to him is that they are confused.
• Explain the idea aloud to an imaginary beginner before you write. Mark Forsyth50:15 paces his room doing this
  • If you can explain it to someone who knows nothing, you have it clear, and you have already made sentences.
  • Peter Attia1:08:41 uses a dinner test. If you cannot explain the idea over a meal, you have not found the essence yet.
  • Garry Tan32:46 says that if you understand something well enough to explain it at the 75 IQ level, you can convince anyone.
  • Alex Tabarrok9:42 cuts a topic to its most stark situation, then adds bells and whistles. He says this helps him see why a first-time learner is confused.

2.2 Say the point first, and say it directly

Plain statements beat flourishes, and unclear writing usually means the thinking is not finished.

• State your point, then get out of the way. Morgan Housel23:09 keeps the question "what's your point?" on his shoulder
  • Readers are more impatient than you think. If the headline and first two sentences don't hook them, they are gone.
  • Ezra Klein20:26 kept a sticker above his keyboard that read "say what you're saying." He credits it for the declarative, stripped-down prose of Abundance.
  • Online tools showed publishers that the average reader of a piece might only reach the third sentence before closing the tab.
• Do not hide a thin idea behind ornament or style. Ezra Klein34:26 calls embellishment used to cover a lack of substance a terrible habit
  • Aim for signal first. Lenny Rachitsky15:41 says the less he thinks about the beauty of his writing, the better everything goes.
  • Strike out whatever sounds like writing. Johann Hari1:05:53 quotes Georges Simenon's editing rule.
  • Lulu Cheng Meservey38:35 says that unless you're a genius, just aim for being intelligible. Her attempts to imitate Hunter S. Thompson came out labored.
• Pair every generalization with a concrete example. Steven Pinker14:43 says a generalization erases detail
  • Without examples, readers nod but do not understand. Without the generalization, the examples feel pointless. lists bathroom, breakfast and Christmas to show that a familiar word need not match its parts.
  • Atul Gawande51:58 asks of each sentence whether it conveys a new piece of information and whether the sentences add up to an accumulating picture.
• Treat muddy writing as a sign of muddy thinking. Sam Altman27:32 saw this in YC applications
  • Founders who did not express themselves clearly in an application also did not explain the plan clearly to their team, investors or customers.
  • Tim Ferriss4:57 had John McPhee ask what a word or sentence meant. If he could not defend it, it was cut, and vague passages got "pea soup" in the margin.

2.3 Swap jargon and fancy words for plain ones

Every word should be one the reader knows, and one you can defend.

• Prefer short Saxon words to long Latinate ones. Ward Farnsworth3:37 says that if you keep only one rule, pick the plain word
  • English has a humble Germanic word (make, get, let) and a fancier French or Latin one (create, acquire, permit). The fancy ones turn into -tion words: acquisition works, "gettion" does not.
  • Do not reach for the thesaurus to sound grand. David Sedaris1:01:40 says write "a cat walked into the room," not "the feline creature."
  • Alex Hormozi1:05:50 writes at a lower grade level on purpose so more people understand him.
  • Sam Parr8:49 notes that Hemingway and Salinger write at about a fifth-grade level yet carry real depth.
• Translate jargon into plain English and see what survives. Francine Prose9:32 assigned this to students
  • The jargon usually turned out to be a few ideas pumped up with extra words. Try it on your own prose too.
  • Write the plain version first and test whether a stranger gets it immediately. Stefan Sagmeister8:51 does this for his exhibition wall texts, because a visitor will read two sentences, not fifteen.
  • At the MASS museum in Mexico, Sagmeister8:51 shows the entry text in artspeak, crossed out, with the same content handwritten beside it in about four sentences instead of fifteen.
• Write out acronyms and replace shorthand that needs its own explanation. Sam Corcos17:40 is almost religiously against acronyms
  • They slow new hires, who must memorize a glossary. Writing the full term takes little extra effort.
  • Tiago Forte14:59 checked every concept, sentence and word for Silicon Valley dialect like order of magnitude, Overton window and leverage. He asked whether each sentence pulls the reader deeper or gives them an excuse to quit.
  • Howard Marks13:41 quotes Mark Twain that a profession is a conspiracy against the laity. He thinks insecure professionals keep jargon to hold outsiders at a distance.
• Keep a word only if it earns its place. Sahil Bloom39:40 asks whether a big word is there to posture or because it is accurate and adds life
  • Check what your words really mean. Michael Mauboussin30:05 was asked if he knew the difference between an error and a mistake, after using them interchangeably through a whole book on the subject.
  • Anne Lamott12:29 uses a thesaurus to dig up words she knows but never uses, like "wept" when writing about crying.

2.4 Name who did what, and use strong verbs

Readers follow people acting, not abstractions.

• Write about people doing things, not concepts. Johnny Harris22:22 follows Pinker's classic style: name an agent and a verb the reader can picture
  • He replaces "globalization" with "America sending Ford to Japan."
  • When a sentence is passive, ask who actually did the thing. Chris Dixon27:47 says flipping the grammar is not enough, because the real problem is you do not know who acted.
  • "The internet was built to be a decentralized system" becomes a story about Vint Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee doing something Dixon27:47.
• Find a stronger verb instead of adding adverbs. Anne Lamott10:42 makes this the first rule of good writing
  • Instead of a guy who walked down the hall, try stumbled, staggered or army crawled. In the second draft she removes the "very" and the "actually."
  • Strip adjectives and crutch words. Chris Dixon26:35 says every "very" means you have not explained the idea well enough.
  • Dixon's26:35 biggest rewrite of Read Write Own was removing almost every adjective and adverb, because phrases like "genuine ownership" let the modifier do the sentence's work.
  • Yann Martel28:19 says an exclamation mark is highly manipulative. Let the sentence carry the feeling.
• Own the action when responsibility is at stake. Lulu Cheng Meservey1:15:15 rewrote CrowdStrike's outage statement
  • She made it the CEO speaking directly: "I'm devastated," "I am sorry," "this is my responsibility," then "here's what we know." Passive third person reads as dodging.
  • CrowdStrike issued its own, much better, rewrite with an apology a few hours after hers.
• When something technical needs explaining, explain it directly. Andy Weir13:39 says one paragraph of exposition can save ten pages
  • A conversational first-person narrator makes the aside natural, because readers accept that someone is telling them the story Weir14:37.
  • His books carry deep science, such as why a microwave door mesh blocks microwaves but lets light through.

2.5 Cut what does no work

Shorter sentences and fewer words make each idea crisp, as long as the meaning stays whole.

• Ask for the fewest words that get the idea across. David Gelb56:11 cuts even lines he loves in service of clarity and momentum
  • Cut any word that is not working. Harry Dry57:01 adds that you are probably not taking Kaplan's law seriously enough.
  • Dry57:01 points to Hiut Denim's "We make jeans."
• Shorten sentences and paragraphs so each idea stays crisp. Atul Gawande51:58 does not run complex ideas together
  • His passage on aging teeth began twice as long with run-on sentences, and he compressed it.
  • Keep paragraphs to two lines. Harry Dry54:05 says short paragraphs are like monkey bars for distracted readers, and a three-line paragraph often means he is not explaining himself well.
  • Alex Hormozi1:05:50 varies sentence length for rhythm: short, short, long.
  • Fareed Zakaria15:10 says for spoken delivery you cannot start with a subordinate clause, because listeners lose the thread. Open with the main clause and qualify afterward.
• Practice compression, not padding. Morgan Housel38:59 calls the page minimum a terrible way to teach writing, because it trains students to expand
  • He gave students a badly written page about the Concorde and had them find the point and rewrite it in 200 words.
  • He cites 500-word essays where 495 words were unneeded, and Doris Kearns Goodwin's roughly 800-page No Ordinary Time as having no wasted sentence.
• Stop explaining once most readers have what they need. Garry Tan32:03 says to explain what 80 to 90 percent of readers need to hear
  • Over-explaining is a miss just as much as under-explaining.
  • The larger your audience, the simpler the message must be. Ana Lorena Fabrega47:54 cites Napoleon, who said directives must be clear because people on the battlefield cannot parse detail.

2.6 Test the draft like a stranger would

Your ear and an outsider's confusion catch what your eye misses.

• Read every draft aloud and cut what you can't say. Francine Prose8:08 tells her students this
  • If you can't get a sentence out of your mouth, or would never say it in conversation, it probably doesn't belong on the page.
  • Ask whether you would say a line to a person. Jason Fried1:16:01 treats a "no" as marketing-mode cleverness meant to impress yourself.
  • Fried spent an hour trying to write a Basecamp description, then said it aloud in 12 seconds and found it better than anything he had written.
• Ask how your draft could be misunderstood. John Lennox30:09 says this is far more useful than asking how it will be understood, because you already know what you mean
  • Picture the reader your words could hurt or lose, then add the sentence that closes the gap.
  • If you write about God as father, a reader whose father was abusive will not relate, so you must acknowledge that not everyone's experience of a father is the same.
• If a reader must reread, fix the writing. Morgan Housel0:55 says there are no points awarded for difficulty
  • You can be deep and still be instantly understood.
  • points to Erik Larson, who writes 200 chapters of a page and a half each, covering what other historians need 17 or 46 pages for.
• Drop cute and clever lines. Robert Greene1:35 avoids colloquialisms and anything that seems cute or clever, so the writing lasts
  • Machiavelli still reads as crisp and modern roughly 500 years later.
  • Sahil Bloom36:00 notices that the lines readers repeat back to him months later are mundane, not the ones he thought eloquent.

2.7 What the books say

Heavy, jargon-filled sentences get plain when you find the real things in them and say how those things connect.

• Pull the concrete nouns out of a heavy sentence, then rebuild it around them. Barbara Minto, The Minto Pyramid Principle
  • List the concrete nouns, then sketch how they connect with simple shapes and arrows. Write one plain sentence that states that link.
  • Her example: a sentence about the cost-effectiveness of sales-force deployment for redefined selling missions became "We must redeploy the sales force to match the new trading environment."
• If you cannot picture a part of the sentence, ask what it means. Barbara Minto, The Minto Pyramid Principle
  • A part you cannot picture is likely padding or jargon. Ask the writer, even if that is you, what it means, and use the answer.

2.8 Where writers disagree

The plain-writing rules are firm, but writers split on how short to go, what to do with real terms, and how much to explain.

• Short versus concise. Some writers want fewer words, others want more comprehension
  • Alex Hormozi1:05:50 wants maximum comprehension, not minimum words, and uses concision only when it helps.
  • Paul Graham55:08 says to say what you mean briefly, but many of his essays are long, with no wasted words.
  • Michael Dean1:11:40 says no single word rule is right alone. Balance concision, precision and inventiveness: "illumination" beats "light" when the undertone matters.
  • Tiago Forte27:26 warns that compressing gains accessibility but costs context, subtlety and depth.
• Avoid jargon or define it. Some cut it, others keep the real term and teach it
  • Atul Gawande50:30 dislikes being talked down to. He uses the words professionals actually use and defines them, not the "kitty words."
  • Tim Mackie and Jon Collins15:44 refuse to smooth out a real mystery. They explain what can be known and name the rest honestly.
  • Stefan Sagmeister9:26 keeps at least one opaque passage so plain writing is not mistaken for simple. He says he should have kept one or two sentences in artspeak in his show.
• Passive voice. Avoid it, or use it with a reason
  • Ward Farnsworth15:18 rejects the blanket rule. The only master rule is to have a good reason.
  • Churchill's "so many owed so much to so few" keeps "so many" and "so few" side by side, and an active rewrite would break that Farnsworth15:18.
• How much to explain. The reader is both new and expert
  • Byrne Hobart1:01:20 assumes some readers learn it for the first time, and even those who know it benefit from elaboration. He weighs this against an angry email from a 30 year veteran.
  • Garry Tan32:03 says to stop at what 80 to 90 percent need.
  • When Sam Corcos34:24 shared metrics widely, staff saw every chart sloping down and thought the company was dying. Revenue had actually tripled, and a zoomed-out chart fixed the picture.
• Plain words versus register. Plain is the floor, but word choice also signals tone
  • Richard Powers39:16 says Latinate words like "mansion" sound higher in class than Anglo-Saxon ones like "house," so choosing between them sets your tone.
  • Steven Pinker26:57 notes that AI output is jargon free and orderly but so generic you can almost recognize it. Borrow the clarity, and bring the freshness yourself.
  • Ada Limón39:59 says a poem needs no advanced vocabulary. Syntax, rhythm and images can make common words land.