2025 has been a year where I’ve learned just as much from my clients as they’ve learned from me.
I’ve worked with academic writers, business owners, creative writers, memoirists, and one-off speech writers. I’ve supported people from nine to seventy-nine, planners and panickers, writers with 80-word tasks and writers with 80,000-word theses.
And no matter who I was working with, the same challenges kept surfacing:
How do I get this thing out of my head?
How do I communicate effectively?
How will I know when that’s happening?
This year I realised something important: most writers aren’t only struggling with the writing itself (although for some, it’s as simple as that!). For most, the struggle is more general – they’re struggling with the act of making sense.
I kept seeing the same core uncertainties:
- people unsure what they were really trying to say
- people confused about structure
- people unsure how to interpret feedback
- people overwhelmed because their ideas wouldn’t line up
The common thread (if you’ll allow me to oversimplify!) is sense-making: making sense of what you think, and then making sure those thoughts make sense on the page.
I’ve ended 2025 with a refreshed understanding of this fundamental idea:
Writing starts to make sense when your ideas do.
It makes sense, then, that my real work with writers begins not with their sentences, but with their thoughts. It’s often a bit turbulent in the creative space in our brains – lots of thoughts and ideas jostling for some elbow room. Add some nerves and uncertainty to the mix and you’ve got a recipe for procrastination and muddled communication.
Some examples (none of them drawn exactly from real life – I value your privacy!):
- New business owners who know their messages emotionally, but yet articulate them clearly
- Post-graduate students who know their content backward but keep getting negative feedback about their writing
- Professional, highly educated teams who can’t find a common language of expression
All of these struggles are normal, human and most importantly, solvable.
What happens when a writer feels that they’re communicating clearly? A gorgeous sense of possibility and potential, that’s what!
I see confidence rising, sentences landing as they should and the writer’s voice emerging with authenticity and passion.
I suppose 2025 has been a year in which I’ve leaned into the benefits – and pleasures – of the planning phase. When you spend a solid amount of time planning, you think more creatively, consider more possibilities and produce writing you’re more likely to be proud of.
In 2026, I want to focus even more intentionally on helping people make writing make sense. I’m adopting these guiding principles:
- Thinking-driven writing
- Meaning-driven structure
- Clarity-driven polish
I’d love you to join me in exploring how to write in a clear, calm, and authentic way, and how to make writing make sense in every part of your work and life. Let’s chat!