Wendy Glavin’s clarity rules
Editor Wendy Glavin shared 10 clarity-focused writing rules today — advice like 'write what you know,' 'show, don’t tell,' and favoring strong verbs over ornament that aims to keep prose direct and readable. Those rules matter because clarity is the single most portable craft skill across fiction, nonfiction and short-form publishing. (x.com)
Wendy Glavin spent today posting 10 rules that all point in the same direction: cut the fog, keep the meaning, and make the reader do less work per sentence. Her own bio frames that advice coming from a New York agency founder with roughly 30 years in marketing, consulting, and writing, not from a classroom exercise. (wendyglavin.com, gritdaily.com) The rules she highlighted are old on purpose. “Write what you know,” “show, don’t tell,” and “use strong verbs” have survived because they solve the same problem in a novel, a sales page, and a 300-word post: vague language forces the reader to guess. (x.com, owl.purdue.edu) That is why clarity travels better than almost any other writing skill. Purdue’s writing guide says readers follow sentences more easily when writers move from familiar information to new information, which is just a formal way of saying: don’t make people stop and reassemble your thought mid-paragraph. (owl.purdue.edu) University writing centers teach the same thing in plainer terms. Duke’s guide pairs clarity with concision, and Agnes Scott’s guide says the clearer the draft, the less effort the reader spends decoding it. (twp.duke.edu, agnesscott.edu) “Show, don’t tell” works because specifics carry more weight than labels. “She slammed the door and missed dinner” gives a reader two visible facts; “she was upset” gives one abstract conclusion and asks the reader to trust it. (grammarly.com) “Use strong verbs” does the same job at the word level. Missouri Extension’s clear-writing guide says fuzzy words and unnecessary words block clarity, while direct verbs shrink a sentence without shrinking the meaning. (extension.missouri.edu) “Write what you know” is less about autobiography than precision. A writer who knows the scene, the job, the argument, or the product can name the exact object, action, and consequence; a writer who does not usually reaches for decoration, jargon, or cliché. (agnesscott.edu, justpublishingadvice.com) That makes Glavin’s list especially suited to 2026, when more writing is published fast and read on phones. On a small screen, every extra clause feels longer, every weak verb feels flatter, and every vague noun gives a reader one more reason to scroll away. (owl.purdue.edu, twp.duke.edu) The reason these rules keep resurfacing is that they are revision tools, not slogans. If a sentence is muddy, the fix is usually concrete: replace the abstract noun, cut the filler, swap in the real verb, and add the detail that proves the claim. (grammarly.com, extension.missouri.edu) So a thread like Glavin’s lands because it offers something rarer than inspiration: a checklist. Ten rules is small enough to remember, and clarity is one of the few craft habits that improves almost every form of writing the moment you apply it. (x.com, twp.duke.edu)
