From Klinkborg "Several Short Sentences"
When your prose beings to stiffen and your thoughts get stuffy, it's sometimes worth reworking the piece you're working as if it were a letter or a long e-mail to a friend, someone who knows you well but hasn't seen you in a while. What happens? The prose relaxes, the sentences grow more informal. You remember to use contractions. Even the words grow shorter. Suddenly things are clearer and simpler and more direct, as if they were being spoken.
But something else happens too. There's suddenly a wider variety of tone, an emotional latitude, a sense that the reader will be able to fill in the gaps, even the possibility of humor.
...
The reader you construct in your imagination changes the way you write almost without your noticing it.
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