Content Editing Hack: Eschew Obfuscation

Nobody writes great copy or content with only one edit.

So here's a great editing hack.

Think about editing like hunting.

Write down a list of things to look for. Then go hunting for them. One at a time.

One thing you should definitely hunt for is big words.

Don't believe me? Check out the following article from the May, 1875 edition of the Pennsylvania School Journal:

When promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical, or psychological observations, you should always beware of platitudinous ponderosity.

So let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehensibleness, a coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency.

Eschew obfuscation and all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affectation.

Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rhodomontade, or thrasonical bombast.

Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity.

Shun double entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscure or apparent.

In other words, write plainly, briefly, naturally, truthfully, and purely.

Don't put on airs.

Say what you mean.

Mean what you say.

Hunt down big words and replace them with simpler ones.

Now, I didn't say boring ones.

Human languages are filled with all sorts of colorful ways to say the same thing ( especially English).

Open up a thesaurus. Combine words together.

Today a colleague of mine referred to Thursday as ”Friday JR.”

Have fun.

The possibilities are endless.

Always hunt yourself.

But also take advantage of tools like Hemmingway Editor. It will do more that just root out big words. It will help you get your writing to a level everyone can understand (Which is apparently that of a 5th grade reading level).

Grammarly is also a great tool.

But don't use these tools till the very end.

They’ll get in the way of everything else.