How to improve writing (no. 105)

Looking at the bare-bones website for the in-the-news Donda Academy, I could not help staring at this sentence:

Writing should be regarded as an activity that necessitates critical thinking, an aspect that is necessary to all good writing.

The sentence appears as Rule 58 on a page about “Who we are.” It’s meant, I think, to sound impressive, but it says in essence that writing requires critical thinking, which is required in writing. It takes about ten seconds of critical thinking to rewrite the sentence to remove redundancy and the awkward aspect.

How about:

Writing well means thinking critically.

Or:

Good writing requires critical thinking.

Or to avoid the clichéd “critical thinking”:

Good writing requires thought.

Or:

Think hard to write well.

From twenty to four or five. Omit needless words.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 105 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]