What Career Professionals Can Learn from On Writing Well
Ana had rewritten the same paragraph of her performance self-assessment four times, each version slightly more formal than the last. It now read that she had "proactively spearheaded cross-functional synergies to drive strategic outcomes across key initiatives," and she genuinely couldn't remember which project that sentence was describing. Her manager would read forty of these in a week. She imagined him hitting the same wall of language in every single one, unable to tell her contribution apart from anyone else's. She opened a blank note and typed, without editing herself, what she'd actually done: she'd noticed a recurring client complaint, built a one-page fix, and gotten two other teams to adopt it within a month. That was the sentence that belonged in the assessment. The polished version had been hiding the only part anyone would actually remember, and she'd almost sent it in.
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
Clutter is the enemy in your self-assessments and resumes
A professional writes a resume bullet claiming to have "leveraged synergistic best practices to optimize deliverables," a sentence so generic it could describe almost any job in almost any company. A hiring manager skims past it without learning anything specific about what the person actually did. Practice: Rewrite each bullet as one sentence with a real verb, a specific task, and a concrete result — what you did, to what, and what changed because of it. If a bullet could apply to a different person's job unchanged, it still has clutter in it. Read the sentence out loud to a friend outside your field and ask what they think you actually do all day.
Rewrite each bullet as one sentence with a real verb, a specific task, and a concrete result — what you did, to what, and what changed because of it. If a bullet could apply to a different person's job unchanged, it still has clutter in it. Read the sentence out loud to a friend outside your field and ask what they think you actually do all day.
Clarity of writing requires clarity of thought about your own contribution
A professional writes a promotion case saying they "drove alignment across stakeholders" without being able to say, if asked directly, what decision actually changed because of their involvement. The vague phrase is covering for the fact that the contribution was never clearly worked out in their own head. Practice: Before writing about any accomplishment, answer one plain question in writing first: what would have happened differently if you hadn't done this? Build the sentence from that answer instead of from a list of impressive-sounding verbs.
Before writing about any accomplishment, answer one plain question in writing first: what would have happened differently if you hadn't done this? Build the sentence from that answer instead of from a list of impressive-sounding verbs.
Revise ruthlessly on documents that represent your career
A professional writes a cover letter in one sitting the night before a deadline and sends it without a second pass, so the strongest point is buried in the fourth paragraph behind three sentences of throat-clearing about their interest in the role. Practice: After a first draft, identify the single most compelling sentence in the whole document and move it to the first or second sentence. Cut anything before it that isn't necessary to understand it, even if it took real effort to write in the first place.
After a first draft, identify the single most compelling sentence in the whole document and move it to the first or second sentence. Cut anything before it that isn't necessary to understand it, even if it took real effort to write in the first place.
Personality survives simplicity in professional writing
A resume bullet or self-assessment written in plain, specific language tends to stand out precisely because so much career writing sounds interchangeable. The specific detail — the actual client complaint, the actual number of teams that adopted the fix — is what makes a reader remember a person rather than a category of role. Clarity here isn't a loss of professionalism; it's usually the thing that makes a professional's actual judgment visible on the page.
Corporate culture sometimes explicitly rewards the vocabulary this book argues against, so writing plainly in a review can feel like breaking an unspoken norm. Where the format allows it, keep one or two conventional phrases for tone and spend the rest of the space on plain, specific sentences — the results should carry the document, not the register.
Name one thing, honestly
Pick one sentence from a recent resume, review, or self-assessment — would a stranger reading only that sentence know what you actually did?
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
After a first draft, identify the single most compelling sentence in the whole document and move it to the first or second sentence. Cut anything before it that isn't necessary to understand it, even if it took real effort to write in the first place.