This really is the basic starting point — clear sentences.

In my speech class, I tell my students this:

I will not teach these steps, because I assume that you already know these:
• How to choose a word
• How to write a sentence
• How to write a paragraph
• How to write a sentence that logically, naturally takes you from one paragraph to another
• How to write, and put in the best order (how to organize) a series of paragraphs

I may be wrong to assume that they already know how to do all of these.  In fact, I may be wrong to assume that I know how to do these well.

All of this may help explain the best-seller popularity of a new book, which I have in my “read one of these days” stacks.  The book is How To Write A Sentence: And How To Read One, by New York Times columnist and college professor Stanley Fish.  (The New York Times champions good writing — remember William Safire and his “On Writing” columns?)

Here’s a sentence from this NPR Talk of the Nation interview with Stanley Fish:

“a sentence is a structure of logical relationships.”

Here’s a little more from the interview and article:

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student,
“Do you think I could be a writer?”
‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sentences?’”

(Fish describes this from a student):
One student began her essay with this sentence: “I was already on the second floor when I heard about the box.”

What is noteworthy about this sentence is its ability to draw readers in and make them want more. It is a question of what we know and don’t know.

This blog is primarily about business subjects, business books…  It is a major business advantage to be able to communicate clearly.  It is a major disadvantage to communicate unclearly, incompletely, or simply poorly.  And writing good sentences, and speaking in clear, easy-to-understand sentences, is kind of ground-zero for clear, effective communication.