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Keep it simple stupid
Keep it simple stupid







keep it simple stupid

Let the music in your writing sing through You also can’t hide a terrible cake under lots of decoration – it just highlights what a bad cook you are. Conversely, too much icing and decoration can ruin a good cake – you lose the essence of the cake and end up with a gaudy mess. But a little icing and decoration makes a good cake into a *great* cake.

keep it simple stupid

Without any icing it’s boring and too plain. The key here is that you can’t improve bad writing by adding lots of long words – it fools no-one. Choose your words wisely and make every word count. It needs to be interesting and have some personality. Your writing needs to be clear, accessible and easy to read. Throw away anything that doesn’t help your messageīalance is important.Get your idea across without using jargon.Don’t use 50 words when 10 will do the job.Focus on your message and make it clear.Keep it simple, stupid! (making the handy acronym – KISS). So the key to good writing is a simple one: It means understanding your topic, pulling out the most important elements and explaining them clearly. That doesn’t mean dumbing down or removing personality and individuality from your writing. And the best way to do this is usually in the most straightforward terms. What’s important, is getting your message across clearly. People who use long, unnecessary words are usually trying to cover up a lack of knowledge – fudging their lack of insight and expertise by blinding you with jargon and technical terms. Wrong: research by Daniel Oppenheimer has shown the exact opposite. And there’s a certain misunderstanding that using long words, and plenty of them, makes you appear more intelligent. Academic method tells us to write lengthy introductions and long, wordy conclusions. So, why do people make their writing long, complex and difficult to understand? You say something because you want to be understood, and that applies equally to the written word. That could be a story, an idea, a concept or even your own emotions. In basic terms, language is about communicating something to other people. So I’ve come up with my own little maxim for these situations: and that’s ‘Keep it simple, stupid!’.

keep it simple stupid

And it never ceases to amaze me how complicated and overly fussy some of us make our writing. As a writer and editor, I get to see a lot of content written by other people.









Keep it simple stupid