As you will probably have noticed before the end of this question, I’m a relatively mediocre writer. I mean, I’m not that bad, I know a lot of people who are worse at it than I am, but I still often notice a pattern in basically everything I write: exceedingly long and complex sentences, giving masses of detail with little apparent regard for how much information the person at the other end actually needs, "stick-on" weird metaphors which appear randomly every time I’m afraid I’m being too technical or annoying (so you get a wall of annoying text with a bit of canned laughter in the middle…), vague sentences that go around for a while as I’m slowly figuring out what I mean to say, long paragraphs, etc. Also, I spend ages proofreading anything I write and worrying about it…
Anyway, I’d like to get better at it. And LW is full of good writers, so surely someone will have advice?
I know the standard piece of advice is "write more stuff", or maybe "read The Sense of Style, or something". And I’ve done both these things, and they’ve helped, but I’m still a pretty mediocre writer. I’m still writing somewhat more than the average person, but if I want to go beyond that and practice even more, it will have to mean a deliberate effort to improve my writing. And if I decide to deliberately improve my writing using advice that’s not more specific than "write more stuff, and then some more again", my efforts will soon fall into that deep endless cave where people drop their New Year resolutions every 15th January…
So, any ideas?
I second GeneSmith’s suggestion to ask readers for feedback. Be aware that this is something of an imposition and that you’re asking people to spend time and energy critiquing what is currently not great writing. If possible, offer to trade - find some other people with similar problems and offer to critique their writing. For fiction, you can do this on CritiqueCircle but I don’t know of an organised equivalent for non-fiction.
The other thing you can do is to iterate. When you write something, say to yourself that you are writing the first draft of X. Then go away and do something else, come back to your writing later, and ask how you can edit it to make it better. You already described problems like using too many long sentences. So edit your work to remove them. If possible, aim to edit the day after writing - it helps if you can sleep on it. If you have time constraints, at least go away and get a cup of coffee or something in order to separate writing time from editing time.