A

8 Qualities of Powerful Writing

Dustin Wax
Dustin M. Wax is a past contributing editor and project manager at Lifehack. Full Bio

Every semester I agonize over how to help my students learn to write

more meaningful, interesting papers. Not just in my class, but altogether.
Writing well is a key skill in todays information-heavy society, and above

1
all else my job is to help prepare students to become active participants
in the society we live in.

Writing well is about far more than proper grammar and spelling. In
fact, good writing often violates the rules of good grammar, sometimes
violently. It is also about more than simply developing a good style.
Hemingway and Proust have very different styles, but both were good
writers.

One piece of advice often given to students is to write conversationally,

and while that can be helpful particularly for students (and others)
who feel that good writing means using a lot of big words and complex
sentences not all good writing is conversational. Malcolm Gladwells
writing is very conversational, and is quite effective for it; on the other
hand, David Mamets writing is famously NON-conversational and he
writes plays and movie scripts that consist almost entirely of
conversations!

While trying to figure out something I could do for this years best and
brightest, I decided to list some of the qualities that make
writing good writing. The characteristics that make the best prose stick
with us, that keep us reading or listening to a book or speech. This is
what I came up with.

1. Powerful writing is readable.

I borrowed the notion of readability from the world of typesetting, where
it refers to the effort required to make sense of the letters and words on a

2
page. A paragraph set in Times New Roman is very readable; the same
paragraph in Edwardian Script is nearly unreadable. In terms of what
makes for good writing, readability is about the basic ability of a
reader to make sense of what is written. A work thats readable is
grammatically sound (not necessarily grammatically correct whats
important is that grammar not get in the way of the meaning) and
stylistically clear, requiring only as much work to understand as is
necessary.

2. Powerful writing is focused.

Good writing has a point, a goal that it is intended to achieve. That goal
might be to sell something, to convince someone of something, or to
explain how to do something, but whatever the point, it informs
every line. Anything that doesnt lead the reader towards that goal is
stripped away.

3. Powerful writing develops gracefully.

Powerful writing is not just focused on a goal, it leads the
reader inescapably towards that goal. That may be through the
use of evidence in support of an argument, through the relaying of a
narrative describing events occurring over time, or in some other way,
but it must be graceful without gaps of reasoning, unsupported
assumptions, missing information, or anything else that would cause a
reader to stumble.

3
4. Powerful writing flows.
Good writing is all of a piece the various elements that make it up fit
together neatly and draw the reader along. Think of how bad joke-tellers
tell jokes: So the priest says Oh, I forgot to tell you that the horse is
gay. Ok, so the priest says Thats the opposite of flow. Flow means
that everything in a piece of writing is exactly where it belongs,
that whatever you need to understand paragraph 4 is present in
paragraph 1, 2, or 3, that each part transitions nicely into the next, and
that the style and tone remain constant throughout. Think of the way
the Gettysburg Address moves effortlessly from the founding of the
United States to the Civil War battlefield on which Lincoln stood.

5. Powerful writing is concrete.

Our society tends to value abstract thinking and generalizations over
concrete particularities, but this tends to lead to particularly limp and
empty writing. The best writing, even when the subject is an abstraction,
grounds its topic in the real world through examples, metaphors and
analogies, and storytelling. This is an intensification of the old show,
dont tell rule powerful writing doesnt just show, it shows in real-
world ways that are easily apporachable.

6. Powerful writing is well-suited for its audience.

A good writer knows his or her audience intimately: the language they
understand, the beliefs they share, the knowledge they hold. He or she

4
knows what assumptions can be made about the reader, and what
assumptions cant be made. Good writing isnt boring because the
writer knows what will hold his or her audiences interest. It is
neither too dense nor too simple for the intended reader its just right.

7. Powerful writing is compelling.

The best writing demands attention, whether through the force of
its argument, the strength of its language, or the importance of its topic.
The reader doesnt want to stop reading even when theyre done.

8. Powerful writing is passionate.

Good writing is about something important. Not necessarily something
important in the grand scheme of things, but something either the
audience already cares about or something the author makes them care
about. And you cant make an audience care unless you care,
deeply, about whatever youre writing about. Its always clear
when a writer doesnt care its what distinguishes the hacks from the
greatest writers and its easy enough not to care when the writer so
clearly doesnt.

Normally Id ask what I missed (and feel free to let me know in the
comments) but I want to ask something else: What kind of writing
speaks to you? What is the most powerful writing you remember? While
writing this, I kept thinking of Barack Obamas speeches, which even

5
people who utterly disagree with him find deeply moving. What about
you?