Here’s a bone-simple way most folks can instantly improve their writing:

Take a look at the last sentence; should it actually be the first sentence?

(HINT: The answer is most often “Yes! #duh! 🤦‍♀️”)

I make my living writing commercial copy (yes, still, despite the rise of AI). At one point earlier in my career I was often asked to “fix up” stuff a client had drafted. One day it dawned on me that, most if the time, the final sentence of a client-written paragraph/section/page should actually be the first sentence. In fact, I quickly discovered that in many cases I could basically just move the final sentence to the beginning, fix punctuation, bill my minimum, and everyone would be delighted.  

It doesn’t matter what type of writing it is—a work email, an article, a speech, a blog post, a product description, a sales page, an essay, even many stories or poems—just put the last sentence first and you’re writing will immediately be clearer and more compelling.

But, why?

What I think is happening here is that most casual writers draft entirely chronologically, “thinking with their fingers” (that is, clarifying their thoughts as they write). As a result, they arrive at the true heart of what they want to say—something I privately think of as “the nugget”—last since, having uncovered that nugget they’d been digging for, they feel a sense of closure and relief and stop writing. They look back at the last few sentences, say “There! Nailed it! This is done!” and walk away. If they revise at all, it isn’t true revision, just proofreading.

The thing is, reading is the opposite of writing (in much the same way that a motor and a generator are opposites: apply current to a motor’s wires, you generate motion at the shaft; apply motion to the shaft, you generate current at the wires). Writers arrive at the nugget last when writing—it’s the product of their process. But readers need to receive that nugget first, because they’ve shown up for the product; they don’t care about the process. (Think about it: people don’t start drinking beer because they took a brewery tour; they take a brewery tour because they already love beer.) First you give them the product, then you have some space to to them why they should care.

Incidentally, there’s a deeper lesson here, which should probably be the first sentence of this post:

Amateurs write chronologically; professionals write the intro last.