You Don't Need to Write Well — You Need to Judge Writing in 60 Seconds

The One Skill You Actually Need

You don't need to know how to write. You need to know how to tell good writing from bad.

Those are two different skills. A head chef evaluates a dish without standing at the stove. An art director spots a weak layout in three seconds — not because she designs it herself, but because she knows the criteria. Writing works the same way.

You commission text all the time. Website copy, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, landing pages. Someone else does the writing: a copywriter, an editor, Claude, ChatGPT. Your job is to look at the result and decide in 60 seconds: ship it, revise it, or trash it. That only requires one thing — understanding what clear writing looks like.

What "Clear Writing" Means in Practice

Five criteria. That's all you need.

One idea per sentence. If a sentence has two "and"s, a "but," and a "which" — it's overloaded. Break it up.

Specifics over abstractions. "We'll help your business grow" is empty air. "We'll raise your landing page conversion from 2% to 5% in 30 days" is a proposal someone can say yes or no to.

Verbs over nouns. "Implementation of process optimization" is bureaucratic sludge. "We'll speed up the process" is clarity.

Structure is visible before you read a word. Open the text and squint. Can you see subheadings, short paragraphs, bullet points? The structure works. A solid wall of text? It doesn't.

The first sentence of each paragraph stands on its own. Readers scan opening lines. If those lines alone tell the story — the writing is good.

That's it. Five checkpoints. Print them out, stick them on your monitor, send them to your copywriter.

Try this now: Pull up the last piece of text someone wrote for you — or that AI generated. Run it through the five criteria. How many did it fail? That failure list is your revision brief.