What Leaders and Managers Can Learn from The Elements of Style
Devon reread the email he was about to send his team about the reorg, and something felt off. "It has been decided that, moving forward, certain roles may be impacted as we work to better align our structure with evolving business needs." Technically true. Also completely unreadable, and he knew exactly why he had written it that way: naming who decided, which roles, and what "impacted" meant felt riskier than staying vague. He imagined his team reading it at their desks, parsing each clause for a hidden meaning he hadn't intended to hide, and forwarding it to each other with question marks. The vagueness he'd reached for to seem careful was about to cost him a week of anxious hallway conversations and one-on-ones spent re-explaining, in plain words, what the email should have said the first time.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Omit needless words
Devon's reorg draft used "it has been decided that, moving forward" to introduce a sentence that needed none of it. Managers often pad announcements with throat-clearing phrases because the padding feels formal, and formal feels safer than direct. The reader has to dig through the throat-clearing to find the actual news.
Draft the plain version first — "We are combining the design and research teams starting March 1" — then add only the qualifications that are actually necessary. Cut any phrase whose removal doesn't change the meaning, especially "it has been decided," "moving forward," and "at this time."
Prefer the active voice and concrete language
"Mistakes were made in how this was communicated" and "certain roles may be impacted" are both passive constructions that hide who did what to whom. Employees notice the missing subject immediately, and the absence reads as an unwillingness to take responsibility rather than as neutrality.
Name the actor and the action even when it's uncomfortable — "I should have told the team sooner" instead of "communication could have been better." If you can't yet name the actor because a decision genuinely isn't final, say that directly rather than dressing uncertainty up as a finished sentence.
Keep related words together and use consistent structure
A performance review lists strengths and growth areas in mismatched formats — one bullet a full sentence, the next a fragment, a third burying the actual ask three clauses deep in a sentence about something else. The employee has to reconstruct what you meant instead of reading it directly off the page.
Put the point of each paragraph in its first sentence, and give parallel items — strengths, goals, next steps — matching grammatical form so the reader can scan the shape of the document, not just the words in it.
Habits, not laws
None of this replaces judgment about what a moment actually calls for; some announcements genuinely need softening, and some silence is the right call while facts are still being confirmed. The point of these habits is that clarity becomes the default you reach for, so any hedge you do use is a deliberate choice rather than a reflex. A manager who has practiced writing plainly can still choose a gentler phrase on purpose, and the team will read the difference.
Cutting words and taking responsibility for actions can pull against each other, because naming exactly who did what often takes more words than a vague summary does. A manager rushing to keep an email short might trim the very sentence that assigns accountability. When you feel that tension, keep the accountable sentence intact and cut length somewhere else in the message — a longer honest sentence serves the team better than a short evasive one.
Name one thing, honestly
Which recent message did you soften with vague or passive phrasing specifically to avoid naming who was responsible, and what would the direct version of that sentence actually say?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Put the point of each paragraph in its first sentence, and give parallel items — strengths, goals, next steps — matching grammatical form so the reader can scan the shape of the document, not just the words in it.