Editing Your Second Draft - How to Unlock the Magic of Writing a Clear Blog Post
Before we begin, marvel with me.
We live in a period of human history when you can scribble down markings to express your inner thoughts. Then, 10 or 100 or 1,000 years later, another person can pick up those scribblings, look at them, and understand what you had to say. Without ever speaking to that person, without even meeting them, your writing changes their life.
Can you imagine a greater superpower?
Lexitecture podcast host Amy Hanlon puts it this way: "As far as I'm concerned, writing is literal magic."
There's a key to pulling off the trick, though. You must write well enough to be understood.
When you edit your first draft, you're discovering what you want to say. Editing your second draft helps you uncover how you want to say it. What does it take to write clearly, regardless of the topic or goals of your blog post?
Let's answer that question.
Have a clear subject for every sentence
Every good photograph has a clear subject. This subject is the center of attention. All other elements of the photograph exist to support the subject in some way.
Likewise, the subject of a sentence is an anchor for the reader's floating attention. If I do not know the subject of your sentence, I can't understand you. Full stop. This is an elementary school lesson, but it is astounding how often writers flub its execution in the first draft.
Here's a simple subject and verb combination.
"The dog ran."
Easy, right? Like I said. Elementary school stuff. The problem is, as we get older, we think we get smarter. We stuff modifiers into our sentences to make the more complex. Like this:
"When taking a morning walk with his owner Pearl Street and passing the donut shop free samples cart out front, the dog ran away from the shop manager, who chasing him with a broom."
"Dog" is still the subject of this sentence. However, in the first example, it's easy to identify the subject. In the second, it's not.
Remember, reading is simply a hunt for information. Your short-term memory piles up words until meaning is found. Unclear sentences take longer to process, which taxes your memory, which increases the chances of your reader giving up. Generally speaking, the fewer words clouding up the subject, the easier that subject is to identify, leading to less brain strain.
Unnecessarily long sentences is one problem that can cause subject confusion.
Toward the end of that second passage about the dog, though, we also discover another big stumble that sends readers into chaos: pronoun displacement.
When you use a pronoun, make sure you know what it refers to
Sometimes, you will use a pronoun can be the subject of a sentence. For us readers, this is a relief because we don't have to read the word "man" 12 times in a sentence. You as the writer can swap it out for the more brief "he." This sounds simple on the surface. It isn't always.
Pronouns are only useful if:
- The noun being replaced (called the "antecedent") has been mentioned earlier, AND
- It is impossible to misunderstand which noun is being replaced
Many self-taught writers fail at the second one, especially when writing about abstract topics (as many of us daydreaming, woods-wandering writers are wont to do).
Here's a sentence one of my writing clients wrote. I've put pronouns in bold:
"If I focused my conversations with this inner being around connecting with the feelings I wanted, I realized this would be worthwhile. It was only about raising a frequency."
We're going to give "this" a pass for now. That's a demonstrative pronoun referring to the previous paragraph. We’ll also glaze over the “I” because that pronoun is typically obvious. Our confusion comes in the second sentence.
“It was only about raising a frequency."
What was only about raising a frequency? Moving forward? The conversations? The connections? This?
We have guesses. But we don't know.
Let's look at another example, pronouns in bold:
"From the person who is just starting to understand their gifts and passions to the highest performing executive or creator, it’s all about mindset."
"Their" is fine here. It's clearly a possessive pronoun that refers to "the person." We are lost, again, at the word "it."
What is all about the mindset? Career success? Hope? Life itself? We don’t know.
(By the way, I've obviously removed some surrounding paragraphs from both these examples. Trust when I say the pronoun was no clearer before I did so).
How can you resolve pronoun displacement? You have a few choices.
- Tweak the sentence to replace the pronoun with a noun
- Insert the noun reference before the pronoun's use.
Option number one might look like this:
"From the person who is just starting to understand their gifts and passions to the highest performing executive or creator, mindset matters most."
While option number two could be altered in this way:
"Mindset is critical for career success. From the person who is just starting to understand their gifts and passions to the highest performing executive or creator, it's all about mindset."
Now you know how to properly use subjects, and you know how to replace them with pronouns. Next is the puzzle of transitioning from subject to subject.
How do you pull that off?
Use repetition and topic strings to transition from subject to subject
Just like there is more than one person at a party, and more than one cat in face right now begging for food, there is always more than one subject involved in a blog post.
The best writing seamlessly shifts from subject to subject. One moment you are reading about hockey players’ birthdays and the next you are learning about lady luck's role in success.
This again feels like a magic trick, but there aren't as many ways to transition as you assume there might be.
One easy option is to repeat the subject you’ve just left in order to introduce the next subject. Terry Pratchett, a fiction master whose books do not have chapter breaks, uses this tactic often.
Take this example from his book, Dodger. The main character is in a tailor’s shop, getting fitted for a suit. I’ve put the repetition in bold.
“Clothes spun past, never to reappear, but never mind because here came some more! It was: “Try these — oh dear no”; or, “How about this? Certain to fit — oh no, never mind, plenty more for a hero!”
But he hadn’t been a hero, not really. Dodger remembered that day three years ago when he had been having a really bad afternoon on the tosh, and it had started to rain…”
Pratchett then spins away on a three-page flashback. By the time you land back in the clothes shop, you’ve almost forgotten you were there in the first place.
Repetition also works in nonfiction. Let's try to deploy that same trick with the mindset example from the pronoun section.
"From the person who is just starting to understand their gifts and passions to the highest performing executive or creator, mindset (subject) matters most."
A great mindset (repeated previous subject) is exactly what Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull (next subject) when dreamed of making a full-length animated film. Catmull (new subject) had no idea how he (new subject) would make this vision come true. He (new subject) only knew the next step.”
Behind the smoke and mirrors, you can see a very deliberate move from one subject to the next.
Your second option when it comes to transitions is deploying what neuroscientist Steven Pinker calls “topic strings.”
Topic strings rely on the brain’s ability to connect words and ideas by association, not repetition. When I tell you to think of “pepperoni,” “cheese,” and “bread,” the subject of “pizza” is a short leap. Lay down topic strings by simply dropping a few words related to the next topic within your sentence
For example:
“Katie Ledecky first slipped into the pool at age 3. Splashing around in her parents backyard, she had never felt more at home, even when playtime turned into an Olympic pursuit.
It's hard to explain exactly how much toll swimming takes on the body. If you want to perform amongst the best swimmers in the world, the hours will be long, the training will be tough, and the mental strain will go through the roof. The required calorie consumption to gain the...”
Although I never mention the word “swimming,” in the first paragraph you don’t feel any friction changing subjects. You slide into the new river of thought easily.
Presto, change-o.
Editing for coherence, objectively
Now that you've mastered subjects and transitions between them, a second-draft edit requires a sharp eye on coherence.
In order to edit for coherence, you must close the gap between what you think you are writing and what you are actually writing.
Editing for coherence is challenging for two reasons:
- You are too close to edit your work objectively
- You have no real-time feedback to make adjustments.
You should overcome the first barrier and create distance when editing the first draft.
The second barrier must be overcome sentence by sentence. Without the visual cues that help us navigate even the most trivial human interactions, the writer must successfully pin the reader down on the first try. In one read-through, your reader either gets it, or they don't.
The key to pulling this off is logic.
Humans are logic machines. We need our sentences to line up in a parade of thoughts connected through reason. At first glance, this seems to introduce an impossible number of variables. Luckily for the writer, though, there are only a few options for reasoning through language.
David Hume, a Scottish philosopher and writer, pointed out three main strategies for reason in his book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
- Resemblance
- Contiguity
- Cause and Effect
Equipped with these tools, you'll find it much simpler to communicate your ideas.
Resemblance
Resemblance is when you connect a sentence with the previous sentence by showing similarities or differences. Deploying resemblance is a way to add depth to your subject. Think: "It's like this, and also like this." Or: "It's like this, but different."
Consider the following sentences, which show resemblance through similarity:
"Golf requires athleticism. Golf requires tremendous hand-eye coordination."
Resemblance through difference looks slightly different.
"Golf requires athleticism. The athleticism required for golf is unlike that required for basketball."
In either case, you likely wouldn't want those sentences to look so stilted. When you're showing resemblance through similarity, you'd add a connector such "and," "also," or "in addition." Resemblance through differences use words "but," "yet," and "however" are big candidates here.
Resemblance doesn't end there, though. Two more common forms of resemblance are elaboration and examples.
Elaborate comes from a Latin word meaning "wrought from labor." It can indeed feel obnoxiously difficult to communicate your ideas through writing, but elaboration gives you a good chance to help more people understand by further explaining your point.
Let's take a look at a passage from Susan Cain's masterpiece book, Quiet.
"When they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining (elaboration)...Every American was to become a performing self. (elaboration)"
In this case, Cain is elaborating on what it meant when Americans began to "focus on how others perceived them."
Elaboration's more concrete sibling is the example. When you give examples, you show concrete examples of your claim. While elaboration adds further description to your point, an example illustrates it.
For example (heh):
"Kroger has the broadest produce section. Look there: apples, oranges, bananas, kiwis, dates, rutabaga, and star fruit (examples). And that's only on the first aisle!"
Most work uses example and elaboration in tandem. They bleed together like different color inks on a page. Just for fun, let's dissect a rather thick paragraph from Rutger Bregman's mammoth book - HumanKind - to see if we can tell the difference.
Hang on tight here.
"In science, too, the view that humanity is bad has reigned for decades(the point). Look up books on human nature, and you'll find titles like 'Demonic Males,' 'The Selfish Gene,' and 'The Murderer Next Door.'(examples). Biologists long assumed the gloomiest theory of evolution, where even if an animal appeared to do something kind, it was framed as selfish. (elaboration on the point). Familial affection? Nepotism! Monkey splits a banana? Exploited by a freeloader! (examples)"
Using resemblance is a powerful way to string sentences together in the form of evidence for whatever claim you're making.
Contiguity
Contiguity is, essentially, linking words together with befores and afters.
"After Linda got out of the shower, she ate toast."
Simple, right? We understand that two events have happened, and we know the order in which they happened. Here's another example from Ben Montgomery's The Man Who Walked Backwards:
"He is out before the sun because he walks backward."
Strictly speaking, contiguity does not implying any sort of connection between ideas. It simply connects events in a time line to move the reader along. Contiguity explains what is happening, but not why it is happening.
In order to do that, you need cause and effect.
Cause and Effect
Something happened for this reason.
In its simplest form, that's cause and effect. If we extend Ben Montgomery's sentence above, we can see a good example:
"He is out before the sun because he walks backward, that is to say, he walks in reverse, and he chooses this time so he may behave in this odd fashion cloaked in darkness lest his neighbors see and cast judgment upon him."
Effect: The man walks backwards without judgment. Cause: Because he starts walking before the sun.
Cause and effect are the big idea writer's best friend. Indeed, many New York Times best sellers are essentially one giant cause-and-effect. "You know how there's this problem in the world?" says the author. "Here's why it's happening."
It usually isn't enough for us humans to take you at your word. Show us the cause behind your claims, though, and we'll follow you into war.
Conclusion
No matter what you aim to communicate through writing, you cannot escape the need for a second draft edit. All of these practical tips help relieve yourself of a search for that ever elusive feeling that you have written good work.
Instead of trying to get something to sound right, try what we've talked about here:
- Have clear subjects for each sentence.
- Use repetition and topic strings to make transitions.
- Make your sentences more coherent with resemblance, contiguity, or cause and effect.
These tools are less romantic, but they go a long way toward turning the amateur writer into a professional one. Or, more accurately, they help even the most inexperienced writer produce professional-grade work.
They help you make magic.
