You have probably sent a message that people did not understand the first time they read it. Most of us have. You wrote it, you sent it, and then the questions came back, the same questions you thought you had already answered. Someone read it twice and was still unsure what to do. Someone missed the one part that mattered. The information was all there, but the reader had to work to find and understand it.
The cost may seem small, so it is easy to ignore. It is also real. A message someone has to work to understand has already taken something from them: their time, and a little of their patience. It takes that even when every fact in it is correct.
There is a quieter cost too. A researcher named Daniel Oppenheimer studied this directly. In a paper in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2006, he found that the long words and dense sentences meant to make a writer look careful and intelligent often do the opposite. In his experiment, complicated writing often left the reader less confident in the writer's abilities.
So clear writing is one of the most ordinary deposits you make into the trust account, and you make it many times a day.
This chapter is about how to make that deposit on purpose.
Two versions of the same message
The easiest way to understand clear writing is to compare two versions of the same message. Here is one message, written twice. It is a made-up example, but it is the kind of message everyone sends: a note telling the people you work with that something is changing and what to do about it.
Here is the first version.
Following a recent review of how we run our weekly check-in, and after gathering input from several people over the past few months, it has been decided that, beginning at the start of next month, a number of changes will be made to the way the check-in is organized and shared going forward. Please be aware that the current approach will be retired, and that the check-in will instead follow the new steps described below, which are provided here for your review at your convenience.
That version holds everything the writer knows. It has the background, the reason for the change, the careful wording, and the full context. The reader takes all of it in, and reaches the one thing they need to do at the end of it.
Here is the same message, written the other way.
Starting March 1, we are changing how the weekly check-in works. Here is the one thing to do: from March 1, post your update in the shared doc by Friday instead of bringing it to the meeting. The old process stops on March 1.
This version leads with what the reader needs. It says the date, the change, and the one action in plain words, and then it stops. The reader knows what to do after one read and can move on.
Both versions are honest, and both hold the real information. The second one reaches the reader on the first read. The first version includes more of what the writer knows, but the reader has to work through all of it before reaching the action they need to take.
That is the art of clarity, shown in one example. It is a single habit you can practice on any message: find the one or two things the reader actually needs, lead with them, say them plainly, and let the rest go.
The legal scholar Joseph Kimble spent years collecting examples like this. In his book Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please, updated in 2023, he gathered about sixty real cases where an organization rewrote a document in plain language. Across all of them, people understood the plain versions better and faster, and they preferred them. The clear version above is the ordinary result of doing that work.
What a clear message shows
It is worth slowing down on what a clear message does for the person who reads it.
When you send the clear version, you show the reader two things at once. You show that you know your work well enough to say it simply, which builds their sense of your competence. And you show that you cared enough to make the message easy to use, which builds their sense that you have their interests in mind. Competence and care are two of the things people weigh when they decide how far to trust you. A clear message adds to both. That is what makes it a deposit.
The evidence is broad
Plain writing helps the people who read it, and the research on this is significant. It covers readers at both ends of the range.
At one end are everyday readers. Sarah Elliott and her colleagues, writing in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 2023, ran a careful trial with parents. They gave some parents health advice written in the usual way, and others the same advice written in plain language. The parents who got the plain version found it easier to understand, and they chose it over the standard one. Because the two groups were chosen at random, the study can say the plain writing itself caused the better understanding.
At the other end are expert readers. Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023 on how lawyers read legal language. They gave more than a hundred practicing lawyers the same contract content in dense legal language and in plain English. The lawyers understood and remembered the plain English better, and they rated it as higher quality and more likely to be signed. These are the readers who work in dense legal language every day, and the plain version is the one they understood best and chose.
So the value of plain writing holds across the whole range of readers. It holds for a parent reading a note and for an expert reading a contract, and for every reader in between. Whatever message you are about to send, and whoever sits at the other end of it, the plain version is the one they will understand. Plain writing serves the reader you actually have.
How to make the cut
The method behind the clear version is one move, repeated. You cut the message down to what the reader needs, in words they get on the first read.
To do that, you start from the reader. Ask what this person has to know or do once they finish the message. That is the part that leads. The background that explains how you got here, the careful caveats, the context you carry in your head: most of that serves you, the writer. Keep what the reader needs in order to act, and let the rest go.
This is the standard that plain-language guidance has settled on for years. The United States federal plain-language guidelines, the rules the government uses for writing to the public, come down to the same instruction: write for your reader, lead with what they need, and use words they already know. It is a practical floor, and anyone can stand on it.
Writing this way hands the reader the whole message with a short path to it. The plainer the version you send, the more skill it usually took to get there. I am hardly the first writer to learn this, and it is a constant reminder of one of my favorite quotes. In 1656, Blaise Pascal explained why one of his letters was so long: "I have made this letter longer than usual because I haven't had the time to make it shorter."
The one thing to do today
Clarity is the most ordinary deposit you make, and it is the one you can practice right now.
Take one message you are about to send. A memo to staff, an email to a colleague, a note to a parent, anything going out today. Before you send it, find the one thing its reader actually needs. Put that first, and say it in plain words. Then let go of whatever is left that does not serve them.
That message will land the first time. It will save the reader a little time and effort, and it will leave them trusting you a little more. That kind of trust is what helps the people across a school district work well together, and do right by the students in their care. You will have added to it with a message you were going to send anyway.