I made a huge mistake a decade ago.

I wanted to appear smart.

So, I wrote like I was writing to my professors.  All academic.

My boss at the time told me, “Do you want to sound smart, or do you want to make sense?"

Great storytellers value clarity above complexity.  👇

If you were to take Ernest Hemingway’s work (a great Nobel Prize-winning writer) through a reading-level checker, you'd find he wrote on a 4th-grade reading level!

Same is true for J.K. Rowling.

Why?

On average, the most regarded authors on any given subject write on a much lower level than their peers.

They know that great storytelling is all about taking your audience on a journey and cutting out anything that gets in the way of that.

So let me ask you...

Do you want to sound smart, or do you want to make sense?