Ask for it back

There is a simple test for anything long you have written, and it has become much easier to run this year.

Hand it to someone who was not inside your head while you wrote it, and ask them to tell you what it says. Not whether they liked it. What it says, in a few lines, and where it seemed to wander.

For a long time that meant finding a patient friend with a free evening. Now there is software that will read a long document in a few minutes and hand back a summary and a list of weak spots. I would not give it a novel. But for a product page, a long letter to customers, the description of a service, it is a fast and unembarrassed first reader.

The useful part is not the praise or the polish. It is the gap.

If the summary that comes back is not the point you thought you were making, the fault is rarely the reader's. Something in the order, the emphasis or the words pulled attention somewhere you did not intend. A reader that misses your point is a warning about the people who will miss it too, and they will not tell you. They will simply stop reading, or buy something else, or reply to a question you never asked.

Writers are the worst judges of their own clarity, because we always know what we meant. The page only carries what is actually on it.

So before anything long goes out, it is worth asking for it back in someone else's words. Wherever those words differ from yours is where the work still is.