We've looked at examples of bad writing and no surprise, you can tell the difference between bad writing and good writing. This is good news. You're already on your way to learning how to write. The question becomes, how do we create good writing? You need to understand the principles that really feed into the whole process. First, you need to understand the main quality of good business writing, what we're always working towards when we write. I call it the windowpane theory and it comes from a quote by George Orwell. He's famous for writing the classic books 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwell said, good writing is a windowpane. What does this mean for our course and for your writing? Let's think about a windowpane and what a windowpane does. First of all, a windowpane is something that we can see through. A dirty window pane can't do its job. If its too dirty to see through, it looses its function. You have to work to see beyond it. Ironically enough, if you can see the windowpane, that's when it's not working. If you can see the windowpane, it's dirty. It obscures what you're supposed to see, which is the view beyond it. A good windowpane, in other words, is invisible, or to put it another way, it's perfectly clear. We don't even notice a good, clean windowpane when we're looking at the view. That's exactly what we're working towards when we write a business document. We want our writing, the words and sentences on the page, to virtually disappear for our reader. We don't want our writing to be obvious to our audience. Our writing should be transparent. It should be the windowpane that the landscape of our ideas burst through in all its glory for our readers. This is the number one principle of good writing and it's really very simple, clarity above all. Everything you do when you write, from your structure, to your design, to your grammar, to your choice of words should be in service of clarity for your reader. >> Quinn, it's exactly the same with graphic design. When we over design, it clouds our message and it makes it harder for our audience to understand what it is we are trying to say. Bad writing calls attention to bad writing and bad design calls attention to bad design. It's all the same. >> You can begin working on the concept of clarity right now. Next time you write an email or memo, look at every sentence and just ask yourself, have I been as clear as possible? Cut extra words, add bullet points for your list to make them easier to read and start to really craft your reading so that it's clear. You'll find that things start to really fall into place for you as a writer with just this simple principle. [SOUND] In the next video, we'll cover the corollary to clarity above all, which is, waste no time. [SOUND] By waste no time, I don't mean that you shouldn't take time to write well. I mean that you should be taking the time to create an efficient reading experience for your audience. In the next video, we're going to talk about why this is so important.