Does Your Writing Mean What You Think?
- hbkiser
- Feb 24
- 2 min read
We don't always read carefully — or truly grasp what we've read.
In terms of the "fine print," reading carefully can produce a very good outcome: Remember the Georgia teacher who won $10,000 in 2019 just for reading the fine print of a travel insurance policy and being the first to email the company?
Or a very bad one: in 2014, six people "agreed to assign their first born child to [the company] for the duration of eternity” in exchange for free WiFi. (This was a wonderfully named albeit unenforceable "Herod clause," inserted to showcase the inherent security issues associated with such services.)
Disclaimers and fine print aside, we often allow our eyes to skim over the words on the page (or screen) without truly taking in the meaning. Ever had the experience of reading the same paragraph or page over and over and over again without knowing what you've read? This happens to me when I'm distracted...but more for our self-editing purposes here, it also happens when I'm overly familiar with what I think I've said.
As writers, we tend to get swept up in the narrative or tangled in the ideas in our head. To read closely and evaluate what a reader actually has in front of them to read, don your editor hat. 🎩
Highlight key items, circle patterns (imagery, phrasing, anything that repeats), and scribble questions in the margins. Ask: what am I doing here? Why this structure? Why this language? Does this repeat too much — or not enough?
Summarize each segment — whether that's a paragraph or a chapter — in three parts: What’s the main idea? What’s the tone? What’s the point? It sounds simple, but it forces you to zero in on the core of the piece—and how well you (or the legal team) delivered it.
