The one-habit-at-a-time mode

Sure, you confront several writing problems each time you rewrite a new document. Most people do. But that lone bad habit burns through your writing like a blowtorch, outshining all the others. One of my clients — a professional writer at an insurance company — was like this. This writer was mature, serious about her work, and willing to improve. Too willing, in fact. Her problems: tired expressions and general rather than specific words. More significant, she used ten words where two would do, creating dull, unwieldy documents.

In her zeal to improve her writing, she tried correcting all three problems each time she wrote. The result: she spent an absurd amount of time rewriting, didn’t rewrite especially well, and eventually grew so frustrated she stopped rewriting altogether. This, of course, concerned her manager. After all, she was receiving a clean $80,000 salary to produce flimsily written copy. At that point I recommended that she revise for one bad habit at a time, starting with the master bad habit, wordiness.

The benefits of this approach were threefold. First, since wordiness accounted for 75 percent of the problem, my client improved each document significantly. Second, by focusing exclusively on wordiness, she overcame the habit sooner. Third, her wordiness had overwhelmed the other problems, making them more difficult to identify; once she cut words, the rest of her writing became more manageable.

The equal-time-to-equal-habits mode

You have several different but equal bad habits. Say, for example, your points spread all across the page, ruining your structure. In addition, your tone is negative — even the most friendly letter sounds like a threat. Both problems interfere with your communication equally and predictably.

In this case, your best weapon is two-pronged. First, rewrite for structure. Then, attack negative tone. Don’t spend too long rewriting for either problem; give an equal amount of time to both. Of course, sometimes you may have only a minute or two to rewrite, your reader literally standing by a fax in some office 2,000 miles away. In this case, quickly rewrite for the most glaring problem. If you’re offering a solution to a problem your organization caused, rewrite for the positive voice. If you’re sending difficult instructions to a reader with a .01 second attention span, focus on structure.