1. Define your audience and purpose.
If you are writing a pamphlet on mental health to be read by nearly all adults, you must ask two question. What do they want to know in order to build a background for what they need to know. You must get into the reader's shoes and think and feel as he does, be as ignorant or as bright as he is. What is your own purpose in writing the material? Do you have five or six key ideas that experts think everyone ought to know about mental health? What do you want the reader to feel and do about mental health? Are you trying to change your reader, or merely remind him about something he already believes? Samuel Johnson said that men need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed.
2. Avoid a lengthy introduction.
Catch your reader's attention quickly. Many introductions are both dull and useless. Your reader may give up before he gets to your first point. Use a short introduction, if any, to make quite clear what is coming, the questions that will be answered. This, too, will help you sharpen the logic of the material.
3. Tell a logical story.
Study your key points and note the basic arguments and ideas being presented. Are your big ideas clearly outlined and developed, or are they hidden? Could a reader easily remember them and tell them to someone else? Is there a logic of time, cause and effect, etc., that you can use?
4. Make your key points visible.
A reader should be able to skim your article, see quickly what it says, decide whether he wants to read it. Therefore, visual guides can make the article clearer and more inviting. Sometimes you can help the reader by subheads, italics, boldface, or by numbering the points made. You can spread your material out typographically, make it less dense in appearance by more paragraphing. Aerate your material, let it breathe, let the white paper show up more.
5. Be concise but clear.
Maybe you have covered too much in one article. It is better to fully uncover one point than to cover 10 points. However, a serious article on a serious problem for a serious reader can be long. Make the article as long as it needs to be. But stop just before the reader's cup runs over. The popularity of proverbs is often due to their crisp and easily remembered wording.
6. Make it personal.
Think of writing a personal letter rather than an article. You can make material personal by using conversation in it, by putting personal the stories, real names, real places. Notice how personal the stories are in Reader’s Digest. Do you nearly always read the "letters" column in Time, Newsweek, or Life? They are personal, simple, and nearly everybody can read them.
If you are writing a story about municipal government, you might well quote what the local citizen said about the garbage problem: "It stinks." Effective writing often sounds like talk.
The dividing line between impersonal reporting and personal reporting is at about the eighth-grade level. When material deals with a named person and his problems it tends to be at this level or below. When it deals with impersonal ideas it tends to be above this level.
7. Invite reader participation and involvement.
All reading material explicitly or implicitly answers the questions of the reader. Note the effectiveness of questions and answers used in printed interviews. Our studies show that they are two or three grade levels easier to read than the rest of the magazine. Effective writing causes the reader to identify himself with, or to involve himself in, the writing.
8. Use pointed examples.
You can simplify and clarify an article by inserting examples. Many highly condensed articles need illustrations, "for examples." These examples may include anecdotes, a more concrete explanation, an illustration which makes an abstract idea concrete. Lazy writers often say: "The reader will think of other examples." This usually means that the writer has run out of them himself. Season writing with anecdotes. You enter the world of the abstract through the door of the concrete. Amplify by examples: in short, "examplify."
9. Simplify the vocabulary.
Avoid pedantic mumbo-jumbo. You can sometimes substitute short, simple, vivid, easily understood words for the longer Latin or Greek equivalents. Instead of confronting problems, just face them. A sine qua non is merely a necessity. A multifacted problem is many-sided. Don't proceed on the assumption. Just assume. Avoid polysyllabic profundity which may dazzle but not illuminate. There is no need to dress up the obvious in the finery of the obscure. However, if important and difficult technical words are needed in an article, explain them or put them into a context that suggests their meaning without insulting the intelligence of the able reader. People do like to learn new, hard words. So don't rob them of this unexpected bonus, this enjoyable serendipity. Important hard words might well be repeated the article. Planned duplication is important.
10. Watch your sentence structure.
Sentences may become too long and too involved by much qualification. This may be necessary when writing for fellow specialists but not for laymen. Remove unnecessary qualification. It is the complexity of the sentence and not its length that is the chief cause of its hardness. You would not make John Dewey's Democracy and Education any easier to read by cutting all the sentences in two. However, some specialized writing can be changed to make necessary qualifications less cumbersome, more easily seen.
11. Repeat and summarize thoughtfully.
As you approach the end of your article you should be answering the reader's questions: So what? What is the author driving finished your article. When the article is long, the reader will forget points made earlier. Carry key points along with you, don't drop them abruptly. When you reach the third or fifth points, you may wish to remind the reader what the and second ones were. In a long article, a summary may recast the key points that have been made. But tell them in a fresh way. Mere repetition is not good enough.
From "Writing for Nearly Everybody" by Edgar Dale. The News Letter, November 1969, College of Education, The Ohio State University.