Good Writing by Neal Allen & Anne Lamott 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences

What's it about?

Good Writing (2026) is a practical guide to making sentences clearer, sharper, and more memorable, using rules that apply to everything from essays and blog posts to speeches and scripts. It aims to pick up where traditional style guides leave off, helping writers turn competent prose into language that feels vivid, persuasive, and alive.

Why do some sentences stay with you while others slide past without leaving much behind? Why does one email, article, or speech sound clear and confident, while another feels stiff, cluttered, or oddly forgettable? Most of the difference comes down to choices made at the sentence level. Tiny decisions about verbs, rhythm, tone – all of these shape whether your writing feels human or forced, precise or vague.
Once you start noticing those choices, you have a real lever for improving almost anything you write, whether you are working on a story, a presentation, or a difficult message you need to get right. That’s where this lesson comes in. Across the next few sections, you’ll learn how good writing earns attention – and keeps it – by looking at how small choices in wording, rhythm, and revision can make your sentences more alive, more precise, and harder to forget. So where does that quality begin?
With the engine that drives every good sentence forward: action. A sentence comes alive when something is actually happening on the page. This starts with choosing verbs that do real work.
Skip the all-purpose ones, "walked," "got," "moved," and find the verb that knows what it’s describing. Your character can stride into the room, or shuffle in, or slip in through the side door. It’s choices like that which sharpen the picture and often remove the need for extra adverbs. The same trap waits with “to be” and “to have.
” Sure, they’re sometimes necessary, but watch they do to a sentence. Writing “he was tired” puts a man in a chair, whereas “he sagged into the chair” puts you in the room with him. Or watch what happens when “she had no money” becomes "she’d spent her last twenty on the train” – the latter tells a small story. When your verbs carry the weight, the sentence pulls the reader forward. That forward pull continues when you favor active construction. If the subject performs the action, the line usually lands with more force and clarity: “The board approved the budget” beats “The budget was approved”.
A sentence can still go passive on purpose, especially when you want to spotlight what was done to someone, but the default should be energy over drift. Even forms that are not technically passive can soften a line if they add distance, so it helps to listen for places where the action feels muffled. Those need tightening, too. Dialogue tags follow the same logic, just in reverse. When someone speaks, the attention belongs on the words spoken, not on a flashy tag. That is why “said” works so well compared with attention-grabbing verbs like “claimed,” “asserted,” or “chuckled.
” It gets out of the way and lets the dialogue do its job. Put together, these moves teach a single habit: make each sentence act, and stop interrupting that action. Now, let’s look at how strong writing also depends on sounding natural, direct, and genuinely like you.
Writing gets easier to trust the moment it stops performing for you and starts speaking to you. That begins with cutting the urge to impress. A sentence may be clever, learned, or ornate, but if you can feel the writer straining for admiration, the spell breaks. The point is to sound less self-conscious.
That’s why plain language matters so much. Short, familiar words often land harder than formal ones because they feel immediate and physical. “Help” usually beats “facilitate. ” “Start” usually beats “commence. ” You don’t lose precision by choosing the simpler word when it says exactly what you mean. In fact, you often gain warmth, speed, and even a stronger bond with the person listening.
So, once you’ve got that bond, it’s time to make the language sound like it belongs to this century – and to the speaker you’ve created. Old-fashioned phrasing can make prose feel staged, as though someone stepped between the audience and the scene to deliver a polished recital. In most cases, you want the opposite effect. You want the language to feel natural enough that the audience forgets about style and stays inside the moment. That matters even more in character-based writing, where the voice on the page has to fit the person speaking or thinking. A stiff sentence can flatten that individuality fast.
Underneath both of those moves sits a simpler claim. Your real voice can’t be lifted from somebody else. It has to build slowly out of what you keep returning to – the subjects, the textures, and the rhythms your ear keeps choosing. When you stop copying admired styles and let your own pace, humor, sharpness, or gravity come through, the writing loosens up. A reader feels the difference. Borrowed prose holds them at arm’s length.
Yours invites them in. So the voice is yours. Now, let’s look at how the process of revision strengthens it.
Most drafts come into the world overexplained. You can spot the pattern in the small connective words sprinkled across every paragraph – “then,” “meanwhile,” “actually," “fortunately” – each one a little hand on the listener’s shoulder, steering them through a turn they could have taken on their own. When time and logic are clear, those helpers turn into clutter. The cleaner move is to let one sentence lead naturally to the next.
And when two thoughts genuinely belong together, a semicolon does the quiet work that a bulky transition might overexplain. The punctuation does the joinery a clunkier transition would have called attention to. Make a few of those cuts and a second category of clutter comes into view: propping-up words like “very” is the obvious offender because it often makes the word beside it less exact. “Very cold” rarely beats “freezing. ” The same goes for filler like “really,” “basically,” “some,” or “thing. ” Small words can create drag, too, especially when a sentence is crowded with prepositions and helper phrases.
“In order to” can often shrink to “to. ” “Meet up with” may become “meet”. This is also the stage where vague pronouns need attention. A bare “this” or “it” can force the audience to stop and ask what the sentence is pointing at. Name the thing, and the line clears at once. All of that trimming prepares you for the hardest cut, which is removing the material that only explains, defends, or spells out what the audience can already infer.
Too much backstory, logic, or commentary flattens the piece and drains its tension. The aim is to leave in what carries truth, surprise, and momentum, while trusting the audience to connect the rest. That’s when revision starts to feel less like cleanup and more like respect. Next, let’s look at how fresher, more exact language gives a sentence extra life once the clutter is gone.
Once a sentence reads clear, the next job is keeping it fresh. That starts with repetition. Plain utility words slip past unnoticed, doing their work without drawing a single eye. A distinctive word behaves differently.
Use it once, and it has force. Use it again too soon, and the shine wears off. There are exceptions, especially when repeating a phrase creates rhythm and carries the reader forward, but most of the time freshness depends on restraint. Knowing the history of a word offers a second tool. When you trace an important word back to its earlier meaning, it often gives you physical qualities you can use on the page. If you learn, for example, that the word “truth” comes from an ancient word for “tree,” then the word starts to suggest solidity, of being rooted in the ground, of stillness and long life.
That kind of connection gives you a richer way to describe what you mean. From there, precision becomes a question for the ear. The right word is the one that fits so naturally that nobody trips over it. A thesaurus helps, because it lets you move past the first decent option to the better one. If you need a word for a shop owner, for example, plain “retailer” may do the job better than something rarer that calls attention to itself. The test is simple: if a word feels false, showy, or slightly off, the audience will feel that too.
Exact language should sound effortless, even when it took work to find. That hunt for freshness leads straight into the territory of metaphor and cliché. Metaphor is one of the basic ways people think, compare, and explain. A good one clarifies by linking the unfamiliar to something felt and known, whether in a brief image or a small story. But once a comparison feels forced, it stops adding meaning and starts pulling attention to itself. Clichés create a similar problem.
They often appear first because they are ready-made, and that’s fine in a draft. The task later is to replace them or bend them into something less expected. That way, the sentence sounds alert instead of borrowed. By now, you’ve got a feel for how word choice keeps prose alive at the level of individual sentences.
Let’s now turn to the music underneath them, since sound and structure shape how a sentence actually lands on the ear. Remember how a single word can lose its shine through overuse? Sound works on the same principle, just at a larger scale.
It sets a pace, builds expectation, and tells the ear where the emphasis should fall. That’s why patterns matter. In English, a series of three often feels complete in a way that two does not. If you say a room was cold, silent, and bare, the third note gives the thought a satisfying close.
On the other hand, sometimes stopping at two leaves a thought more open, more tentative. See? Try reading your work out loud and listening for whether a list clicks into place or trails off too soon – and whether a sentence wants neat closure or a little extra air around it. That same attention to sound helps with sentence length. Long sentences aren’t a problem when they keep moving in one direction. They need clear links, steady control, and enough momentum that the listener never loses the thread.
A long sentence can follow a mind in motion or gather a whole scene without stopping every few steps, but it has to reward that extra time with a strong finish. Short sentences do the opposite job. They interrupt the flow on purpose. After a long, lyrical passage, one brief line can act like a firm hand on the shoulder. It resets attention and sharpens emotion. Long or short, the final position is where most of the weight belongs, since that’s where the sound lingers after the period.
A weak ending, on the other hand, lets the energy leak away. Once you hear sentences this way, you start shaping them less by grammar alone and more by timing, pressure, and release. You’ve now seen how rhythm and ending pressure can lift a single sentence off the page. The next move scales that same control upward into something bigger: dialogue, scenes, and writing a world so vivid the reader feels they could walk around inside it.
A scene holds attention when the writing gives the audience something they can hear, see, and feel right away. Dialogue is part of that effort. It works best when it is lean and shaped by character, with each speaker sounding like a distinct person rather than a mouthpiece for explanation. The same principle guides description.
Start with what happens in the world before you pause to comment on it. If a teenager wipes his palms on his jeans before knocking, you already know a lot. A short bit of telling can still help when it saves time or keeps the pace from sagging, but the concrete moment should usually come first. Once those details are in place, restraint matters. Your first description of a person or setting should be distinctive enough to stick, because repeated touching-up usually weakens the impression instead of strengthening it. Then the senses widen the scene.
Sight does a lot of work in early drafts, but sound, smell, touch, and taste are often what make a moment feel inhabited. A kitchen doesn’t fully come alive when you mention the table. It becomes more present when onions sting the air or a damp dish towel slaps the counter. One or two well-chosen sensory hits can hold an entire scene in place. Speaking of holding scenes in place, watch out for filter words once those sensory details are working. If the page already carries the experience, phrases like “she thought,” “he felt,” “she noticed,” or “he wondered” push the audience back a step from what’s happening.
Trust your listener to read between the lines. They can sense embarrassment from a pause, fear from a glance at the door, or love from a hand that lingers. Give them enough to build with, and the scene will feel more alive because they are helping complete it. In the final section, let’s look at artistic nerve, finishing the work, and knowing when to lean on others to make it better.
Strong prose reaches its full strength when each sentence starts carrying more than a single load. Sure, a strong sentence should move the thought forward. As we’ve learned so far, it should also create rhythm, reveal character, sharpen mood, or bring in sensory life. When you put all these together, your writing becomes layered.
Ask more of each line, and the prose begins to feel denser, richer, and more alive without becoming crowded. Once you start writing in a layered way, a more difficult demand often follows: writing honestly. Think about it like this: precise language leaves less room to hide, pushing you toward the subjects that matter most. This could be fear, love, memory, shame, belief, or mortality. These subjects are hard because they force you past familiar wording and into something more exposed and more exact. That kind of truth requires judgment as well as bravery.
Rules help, but they are tools, not chains. You practice them until they sharpen your ear, and then, when the sentence truly calls for it, you allow yourself an exception. A fragment may sound exactly right. A plain word like “very” may earn its place. What matters is purpose. The only rule that remains firm is clarity.
Once the audience loses the thread, freedom curdles into self-indulgence. After courage and judgment comes the test many writers dread most: finishing. Doubt will tell you the work is failing, that the draft is weak, that starting over would feel cleaner. The wiser move is always to keep going. Completion teaches you what the piece is trying to become, even when the first version misses. Once you’ve reached the end, you still need another pair of eyes.
A talented editor will catch blind spots you cannot see, strengthen what is already there, and help the work become more consistent without stealing its voice. That’s how strong writing reaches its best version, and how you learn to lean on both your own effort and the help that lifts it the rest of the way. The main takeaway of this lesson to Good Writing by Neal Allen and Anne Lamott is that strong writing is built sentence by sentence.
Clear verbs, natural voice, careful revision, fresh word choice, rhythm, vivid detail, and honest judgment all help language feel sharper, warmer, and more alive. You don’t need grand talent or flashy style to improve. Instead, embrace attention, constant practice, and the willingness to keep refining what is on the page. With time, your writing can become clearer, more memorable, and more fully your own.