Day 15: Use fewer words “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery Key point: you don’t need as many words as you think Your readers spend more time reading other people’s work rather than yours. If you can get to the point and be brief about it, you’ll earn their thanks and their attention. Most business writing has too many words. Press releases typically run to 500 words or more when 200-300 would do fine. Clients often ask me to write 1000-word case studies when half that is more readable and more engaging. Why is this? Partly, it’s the way it’s always been done. Sometimes, document templates and web designs force people to write more words to fill an arbitrary space created by a graphic designer. More often, it’s because people lack the will to do enough editing. Was it Mark Twain who wrote: “I’m sorry to write you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.”? Today’s exercise is simple. Find a piece of writing that runs to about 1,000 words. Two pages of A4 or a long online article will do. Then edit it in Word so that it is 500 words long. Then take that version and cut it down to 100 words, then 50, then 25. See what is left of the story at each stage. The purpose of this work is to practice editing for length and also to see how much of an article remains even after you cut the number of words dramatically. Here’s a tip: it’s often easier to paraphrase or remove paragraphs or sentences than it is to try to achieve a big cut by snipping a word here or there. The end result still has to be readable and natural when you’ve finished it. Microsoft’s word count feature will help. Also, if you can find it, Word has an autosummarise tool. Just search for ‘summarise’ in Help.
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