100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Provide facts
Twelve ways to give your words power

In the following paragraph, the writer has drawn the right conclusions. His statements are factual. But because he is telling the reader his conclusions instead of providing the facts from which the reader can draw his or her own conclusions, the writing will not have impact.

A lot of people go to Las Vegas. In fact, some people like it so much they go back again and again. A lot of them fly in from a lot of different places, and start gambling right off the plane. They spend a lot of money in Las Vegas, at the casinos, and on their housing and transportation.

The above information lacks the facts needed to prove the author’s point. Look below at a paragraph I wrote on the same subject in High Stakes: Inside the New Las Vegas to see how much more persuasive an author can be with facts.

Las Vegas is a city that in 1990 drew 20.3 million visitors. According to polls conducted by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, 75 percent of them were repeat visitors, and 35 percent were Californians. Forty-two percent flew into McCarren International Airport, eighteenth busiest in the nation, on one of the 575 daily flights, where they were immediately greeted by slot machines rumored to be the stingiest in town. . . . They stayed, for the most part, in the city’s 63 major hotels and 214 motels. They spent about $13 billion on hotels, meals, transportation, and entertainment, and left behind almost $4 billion in gaming losses, more than half of it in the city’s 85,000 slot machines.