Message Is Everything

My writing students sometimes fall short of getting their message across because they don't state it clearly enough. They hint at it, they dance around it, they take a general stab at it, but they don't directly state what they really want to say. This often happens because writers see what they meant to say rather than what they actually said. When reading back their writing, they are blind to the lack of clarity that keeps readers guessing. It sounds good in their heads because their message is clear and evident to them, but they can't see how the vision in their heads fails to translate to the written page. So to gain this clarity, we have to step back from our writing. We need to put distance between what we thought we said and what we actually said. There are several ways to do this. One is to re-read our work after we've had a break from it. This allows us to gain a healthy detachment from work we have been intimately involved with. Another is to read our work out loud. The sound of our spoken voice is easier to "hear" than the voice in our heads. Another is to have someone else read our work and give us feedback. Another person's perspective is like a mirror that sends back to us an image of what really exists. Whatever the technique, the goal is to create some distance from our own work so that we can see it clearly and realistically. We need to know if our message has transmitted because, if it hasn't, our writing has failed us and our readers won't respond to it. Message is everything. We must make sure we get it right.