A comment came back on my draft, the same comment in a different form, third time this week. It was the clinician who reviews my pages at a practice I write for.
“We do not assume.”
“We do not conclude.”
“We do not put words in the reader’s mouth.”
Be soft. Try this.
“In our experience.”
“From what we have seen.”
“We find that.”
All writing advice calls those hedges and says cut them. Be assertive. Commit to the sentence. Confidence is half of style. I had spent years building mine.
So I fought her for weeks in the Google Documents. My whole trade is filling in the invisible. Give me the door and I will build you a house around it. I would land a clean, confident sentence in paragraph four, a sentence any other editor would praise, and it would come back with the same note in the margin.
“We cannot know this.”
“She is sanding the writing, pages become porridge like this.” I thought to myself
She was right, I was wrong. I was too young and too sure.
The person reading a therapy page is deciding one thing, at an hour that isn’t very kind.
Do these people understand me?
Write “anxiety makes you cancel on your friends” and the woman who never cancels, who shows up everywhere smiling and empties out at home, learns in one sentence that the page was not written for her.
Write “depression makes it hard to get out of bed” and the man who gets up at 6 every morning and has two jobs closes the tab. A page about depression just told him his depression does not count.
A confident sentence about the reader is a guess. When the guess hits, it reads like understanding. When it misses, the reader does not think the writer missed. She thinks she does not belong here, and she is gone.
In our experience does something exact. It moves the weight of the sentence off her and onto us. We stop telling her what she feels. We report what we have seen, and she decides whether she is in it. The sentence gets weaker. The page gets stronger.
I still feel the urge every draft.
She still finds it.