Finding Your Idea's Core Will Improve your Thinking

Getting to the point your idea is really trying to make doesn't just make your ideas stickier. It also makes your writing and thinking clearer.

Choosing one piece of your idea to elevate above the rest will do wonders for the clarity you communicate with.

One of the small frustrations that come from office work is bad communication. It may arrive in your inbox in a dense unreadable email. Maybe you’re unlucky enough to have a manager who likes to say the same things in different words all day.

Wherever you encounter bad writing, it’s to fix. A large part of clarifying writing is clarifying thinking. People write emails that seem to go nowhere or speak the same thought in different ways because they haven’t figured out what they really want to say.

Chip and Dan Heath offered some practical tips for getting to your idea’s point in their book Made to Stick. It’s easy to miss those tips in a business book, but drawing them out really is valuable.