Clarity of thoughts

3-1-1-1 framework to help you bring clarity to your thinking and writing

My discerning husband keeps discovering new ways to help our kids learn essential life skills. One of those skills, he feels, and I agree, is writing with clarity.

How can you know if writing is done with clarity?

It’s simple. It will flow like a single stream of river 🌊. You won’t be scratching your head to make sense of it.

Let me give you an example. My son comes home from the playground and starts telling me about his day. "Mom, I had so much fun on the swing today! I went back and forth, higher and higher until I felt like I was going to touch the clouds!"

I'm intrigued and ask him to tell me more. But before I can even get excited about his story, he jumps to another one, entirely unrelated. "You know I saw the biggest moth in the bush. It was green and yellow and then it flew....bla bla bla." I barely tune in to the moth story but then he starts with another thread. "Have you seen this new TikTok trend where...” And then, we’re back to the moth in the bush.

I don't know if you faced this with your children, but both of mine have been in this 'all over the place' phase of telling stories. This is where the importance of clarity in writing comes in.

Exploration is good. Discovery is good. But then there comes a time when you need to gather all your thoughts, structure them, and deliver them in a listener-friendly way.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love hearing about the biggest moth in the bush and the latest TikTok trends, but I also want to be able to follow a coherent story from start to finish. More importantly, I want them to learn the art of making and delivering beginning-to-end stories.

To teach them this important skill, my husband came up with a simple yet effective framework: 3-1-1-1.

Here's how it works. First, the kids choose a topic of their interest and write 3 pages on it. Then, they rewrite the content with the challenge of confining it to 1 page, without missing out on the most important details.

Most times, they come out of this exercise surprised: "How could I compress all of that into one page?"

The writing challenge doesn't end there, though. Next, they need to turn that 1 page into a paragraph, and then the paragraph into a sentence.

If you think a sentence can't hold all of the detail, you're right. My daughter had a tough time turning her beloved Netflix series into one sentence. As much as she loved describing the theme, plot, and characters in detail in three pages, it was just as difficult to condense it into one paragraph and then a sentence!

After doing this exercise for a month now, I see a considerable improvement in their writing. In fact, I even see a considerable improvement in how they converse.

Turns out, ‘being all over the place’ isn’t just a writing dilemma for kids. We, adults, make this mistake all the time in our work presentations, meetings, emails, reports, and even conversations!

We want to do justice to all the information in our heads, but in doing so, we make the life of the receiver difficult. What if we could run 3-1-1-1 in our heads before we send that 60-slide deck, 100-page document, or hold a 2-hour meeting going round and round in circles?

What if we could find the best version of our story in 1 page, 1 paragraph, or even 1 sentence? It would save hours in your day, which you could spend chilling with your family, going for a long walk, or playing a game of badminton with your friends. We, grownups, need 3-1-1-1 as much as the kids.

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Time to walk the talk.

Here’s a one-paragraph version of the above post:

My discerning husband and I came up with a framework called 3-1-1-1 to teach our children the importance of clarity in writing. We first ask them to choose a topic and write three pages about it, then rewrite it on one page, then one paragraph, and finally, one sentence. This exercise has significantly improved our children's writing and conversational skills. I believe that this framework is not only beneficial for children but also for adults in their work presentations, meetings, emails, reports, and thinking, in general. It can help us find the best version of our thought process.

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One sentence version:

To become a better storyteller, it’s worth tuning the size of your narrative from the broad range of extra long to concise.