Most people reply to an email by hitting ‘reply’ and typing their answer to the sender’s questions at the top of the email thread (top-posting). This works OK for replies to short emails with a single request, but for longer emails,** try responding inline **instead. This means typing your response directly within the body of the email. Find the sentence you want to respond to, insert a new line (or two) and type your response of comment.

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A: Constraints lead to innovation. The scientists working for DeepSeek didn’t have the money and data centres filled with £30,000 microchips so they had to find a different way to build artificial intelligence models. They did it by asking better questions of the data rather than cramming more and more data through their processors (as I understand it, anyway). You can apply this approach to your writing. The most obvious constraint is time.

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“Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.” So said Saint Thomas Aquinas. Let me paraphrase it: not every long document is worth the time it takes to write it and read it. Remember that when it comes to writing your next long-ish document. Think about whether you are making your job harder than it needs to be. Perhaps a short document will meet the need. Perhaps you can write in shorter sentences that take less effort for you to think up, and less effort for your reader to read.

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Step 5 is fix the line length so that it is about 65 to 75 characters wide. Do it by widening margins and increasing font size. If you know how to change line spacing, set the body text to have line spacing of 120% or 130%. You’ve created white space and made the text readable So that was my 5-step process: Step 1: delete unnecessary paragraphs and sentences. Step 2: make sure the bottom line is up front.

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Step 4 is to remove adverbs and adjectives from what remains of your original draft. Use stronger verbs and nouns instead. Instead of checked carefully write scrutinised. You can find many of them by searching for “ly “. Better than that, there are various writing apps and web services that are better at highlighting the syntax in text, such as iA Writer and Hemingway Editor.

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Step 3 is rewriting passive sentences into active ones. Or most of them, at least. You want sentences that are subject-verb-object. Not “25 invoices were tested” but “we tested 25 invoices.” Searching your text for “was” and “were” can help find your passive sentences. Also search for “It is” and “it was” and rewrite sentences that begin with those phrases. They are dummy subjects so change those sentences to start with the actual subject.

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This week I am going to release 5 short videos explaining how you can take one of your reports and make it more effective. Each day will be one step of a 5-step process. Step 1 was to cut out unnecessary paragraphs and sentences. Step 2 is to ensure bottom line is up front. The reader needs to know what the document is about. In just a sentence or two.

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When newspapers first moved online longer articles ran over multiple webpages and readers had to click to move to the second and later pages. Most readers didn’t click. Journalists learned something they couldn’t know when newspapers were on paper: that most of the words they wrote, words they were proud of, were never seen by readers. Online articles are now shorter—on one page—and written in short paragraphs. Often paragraphs have only one sentence.

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