Writing with kindness

The theme of today’s magazine article from the folk at the Visual Thesaurus* was writing with kindness.  I found this a really useful reminder to write with your reader as a real person very much in mind.  If being ‘kind’ strikes you as an odd thing to associate with writing, take a look at the expanded meaning of kindness:

helpful to other people; agreeable; showing consideration and anticipation of needs; generously responsive; providing assistance or serving a useful function

And I’m guessing some or all of those are characteristics you’d like your writing to demonstrate…?

Being kind (as per Daphne Gray-Grant’s article) ‘translates’ into writing style by, for example:

• avoiding the use of jargon
• writing the way that you talk
• making it easy for your reader to follow your writing (use of headlines, paragraph breaks and so on)
• being concise

(Being concise is valuable for lots of reasons but it gets you brownie points here because less text = less time, and for most readers that’s a definite bonus.)

For me, the key to writing with kindness is to imagine the person that I’m writing for, to write with them in mind.  Any tips you’d like to share on how you write with kindness?