Okay, I’m going to tell you One Rule about writing that will help you make sense of every other rule about writing.

And it’s not scary like a certain ring to which my title here makes reference. I think it’s rather on the elegant side.

If you’ve ever gone looking for writing advice, you know there is more of it out there than you could ever digest in a lifetime. Much of it is quite good, too, or at least decent. A lot of it will feel repetitive (because it is), but sometimes we need to be reminded of the same things over and over again.

By and large, I’m in favor of more advice being out there, because it means, just maybe, more people will learn how to write well (or at least reasonable well).

But I also know the feeling of there just being too bloody much information out there. Sometimes you read contradictory advice. Sometimes the advice doesn’t make sense. Sometimes it makes sense, but you’re pretty sure the writer breaks her own rules all the time.

Or maybe you’re reading a really good post about copywriting like this one, but it just feels like there’s too much in there to remember.

A Simple Writing Rule

To help you navigate all the other writing rules, you need a simple rule to refer back to.

When I taught college English, I developed several pithy phrases about writing for my students. I thought they were pithy, anyway. They are also sort of gnomic, meaning you have to wrestle with them a bit to really get the most out of them.

But there was one rule I kept coming back to, and that’s because, if followed, it helped students learn all the other rules.

The One Rule: As a Caution

The One Rule that guides and controls all other rules actually has two forms. The first form is a caution:

The hardest thing about writing is it’s so easy.

What do I mean by that? Only this: We learn to write at such a young age that as adults we tend to think we know enough about it. Sure, if someone asks us to write a poem or story or research paper, we may say, “I’m not a great writer,” but we only mean that we don’t really know about those things.

When we need to write about subjects we’re more comfortable with, or when we don’t feel like we’re being judged or graded for our writing (think emails, notes for a presentation, or project reports), we rattle them off quickly, hardly thinking about what we’re saying — because we know what we’re talking about.

And that’s the problem. We know what we’re talking about, but that doesn’t mean our audience does. Good writing takes time, takes proofreading and a conscientious eye.

So, don’t get ahead of yourself. Slow down. Good writing requires thinking about your audience.

Take a break from your writing. Go back over it and think about who may read it and what they need to know in order to understand your message.

If you can just ask yourself, “Would my reader understand this?” you’ll catch probably 75-90% of the weaknesses in your writing.

The One Rule: As a Tool

The One Rule can be rephrased as a writing tool, a method of getting over hurdles.

When I say, “The hardest thing about writing is it’s so easy,” I know that many people do talk themselves into thinking writing is difficult or painful. The result is they can’t even get it started. The deadline looms and they get more and more anxious about their writing — which, technically, doesn’t even exist, yet.

Yet the best way to overcome our writing difficulties is quite easy: keep writing. The hardest part about that is to convince yourself that it’s okay to keep writing despite every objection you’ve been raising about why you can’t.

The second form of the One Rule captures this idea:

The answer to every writing problem is to write!

If you use this rule as a writing tool, i.e., if you remind yourself to just keep writing, you’ll find, over time, that you get more writing done.

Think about it: if you are having a hard time writing and you don’t write anything, what do you have to show for your time and frustration? Nothing.

But if you keep writing, if you write through the difficulty, then, worst-case scenario? You have some bad writing.

See the difference? If you have bad writing, and you can recognize it as bad, you can fix it and make it decent writing and then good writing.

But you can’t work your way to good writing by not writing at all.

Obviously, sometimes you may need to do some research, but there’s such a thing as too much research. “Too much” research occurs when you fail to write as you go, and so you keep researching and researching without really knowing if you’re heading in the right direction or if you’ve gone well beyond what your project requires. The only way to bring into focus what the right amount of research is? Begin writing.

(As an FYI, you’ll almost always discover by this method that you cannot fit all your research into your project. The good news is you may be able to carry some of it into the next project — which will also require more research, much of which will have to be carried over into the next project, and so on. Research is like a well that replenishes itself.)

Living by the One Rule

How does the One Rule help clarify all other rules? Because it forces you to try them out. When you read a post with 18 great rules for writing, you may feel overwhelmed and disinclined to try any of them. Well, according to the One Rule, the best thing to do is to pick one of those 18 rules and use it in your writing.

You’ll find that, by actually trying out the other rules, you learn why those rules emerged in the first place. You’ll learn what power they have. You’ll learn their limitations. You’ll forget you ever learned it as a rule and pick a new rule to try out.

And then you’ll get to the point where you can rattle off a blog that incorporates many of the best rules, but you weren’t even thinking about them, and you’ll go back and make sure you used them all well and that your audience can follow you.

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