Three things I learned as a newspaper report that you can use to make your writing better now.

Writing something in your voice that the world needs to hear is so worth it. Yes, it can be grueling and, at times, not fun at all. But it is also full of surprises.

When you are about to write something professionally, just about any communications person, including me, will inevitably ask “who is your audience?”

I’m beginning to realize that is a really bad question for people who struggle with writing.

I could feel my heart racing. I was a reporter in Guatemala at a time when the civil war was still raging. Bomb scares were part of daily life. My colleagues and I nervously entered our building every day.

I check the time. It’s 8:30am. I know I shouldn’t call my colleague yet. Each morning she meditates and does yoga. She gets to her office no earlier than 9:30am. Every year, she and her husband take a three-week hiking trip to a faraway exotic spot. She won’t let anything get in the way of her morning routine or her yearly trip. It’s what keeps her sane, she says.

Some of my clients ask me to “find the gold” in their research or evaluation projects. Here’s what I mean: my clients know that there is important information buried within a report but it’s hard to find and decipher. That’s often because researchers or evaluators haven’t stepped back and done two things:

Many of our clients worry that they don’t reach the people they most want to influence.

The problem comes when we start thinking about an audience as a disembodied, amorphous group. We don’t picture them as individual readers. That makes it easy to forget that pretty much everyone likes clear, vivid writing. I want to talk about the vivid part here.

We often hear the admonition to write shorter. It’s a good idea. More and more, though, I see a poor execution of that good idea. Often, writers are stuffing too many complex ideas into too few sentences.   

I read, or tried to read, the policy brief 3 times.  It was awash in jargon, confusing long sentences and broad empty statements. The whole thing was putting me to sleep—and it was only 4 pages long! I had no idea what the author was trying to say and worse, I didn’t care anymore.

The foundation and nonprofit world is awash in unclear, jargon-filled terms that most people don’t understand. Look through any nonprofit publication and you will see terms like “systems building,” “capacity building,” and “organizational change.” What do any of those terms really mean?