Kill the paragraph

When I was a junior in high school, I was an excellent writer.

I was in 5 AP classes.

I got great marks on all my essays.

I had the style DOWN.

My future of writing was looking pretty great, honestly.

But “school writing” is MASSIVELY different than real-world writing.

And for a good 7 years, I made 0 impact online with my words.

Why?

I was still writing essay format, optimizing for sounding smart, and centering everything around a thesis.

That doesn’t work online.

Digital writing is all about being:

• Clear

• Simple

• Concise

• Valuable

So I learned what actually worked and changed my ways.

The results?

I earned over 20k followers on LinkedIn

I built an audience of 65k+ on Twitter

I got my newsletter to 2k with little effort

I landed multiple awesome jobs

So here’s the secret sauce to digital writing:

Kill the paragraph.

Nobody reads an entire article, start-to-finish, on the internet. It just doesn’t happen.

People DO skim and scan.

Use clear headlines, give each sentence its own line, and don’t use big words.

This sounds too simplistic, but trust me.

Write this way for a month and come back to me and report the results.