Review of “Writing to Be Understood” by Anne H. Janzer

Brenda Keller
3 min readAug 3, 2021

I’ve been doing a lot more writing than I had in the past, so I thought this book would be a great book to read. This book had a lot of good information about different ways to communicate to help readers stay interested in your writing and keep them reading until the end. There was also some great advice about how to help the reader feel like you’re having a conversation with them personally.

There were three parts to the book:

  1. Understanding Your Reader
  2. How to Explain Complicated Ideas
  3. How to Not Be Boring

Some of the key takeaways I got from the book were:

Know How Much To Share

I definitely try to do this in my writing, but it can be difficult because you don’t know who will read what you’re writing. Limiting jargon and providing more background information may be important if you are writing for someone with little to no knowledge of the topic. But, if you’re writing to peers, for instance, you can get to the main points more quickly without a lot of background details.

The Effectiveness of Repetition

--

--

Brenda Keller

Software coach showing others that software is easy to learn.