5 easy ways to shorten your copy – and make it work better

Boxes, pyramids and vanishing detail

[Image courtesy of Jenni C at Flickr Creative Commons]

As the Twitter revolution has clearly shown, shorter is better. If anybody had told you 10 years ago that we’d all be sending 140-character messages and still including everything we wanted to say, you’d have dismissed them out of hand.

And yet, that’s exactly what’s happened. In the space of a few short years, we’ve all learned to be more concise and to cut out all the extraneous detail. Which proves that when we have to, we can. 

If only web pages, emails and brochures came with a word limit. But they don’t, so we give free rein to our creativity and say everything we have to say. And then some. 

The result is copy that people simply don’t read. Maybe once they would have. But Twitter – plus all the other bite-sized communication out there – has set the expectation. Well, that and all the digital distractions and interruptions we have nowadays. Today, more than ever, you have to get to the point fast. 

So let me do just that and give you five simple ways to cut down your copy.

1. Summarise. This is actually cheating, but if it works, who cares? An executive summary at the start of a whitepaper is simply a short version of the document, designed for busy people who like to skim. If they read it, they get the gist without wading through the detail. If they want the detail, they know exactly where to find it.

   And it works not just for whitepapers. You can summarise virtually anything by including the key points in subheadings, bullet points, numbered points, call-out boxes or at-a-glance guides. In a way, it’s the best of both worlds, as you’re catering for the skimmers and delvers.

2. Hide the detail. Yes, this is also cheating, but (a) you’re busy and (b) it’s easy, so refer to point 1. With this, you simply move the heavy stuff out of sight, so that it’s there but not up-front.

   So your landing page has the bare bones, with an attention-grabbing headline, or an overview. Then allow people to branch out to pages with more detail. They can select the area that interests them, rather than be overwhelmed by superfluous detail.

3. Write from the top down. If you can’t stop yourself saying absolutely everything (and often, it’s the only way to get all that stuff out of your head) then go on and do it. But try to prioritise as you go. If that’s too much like walking and chewing gum, then just put it all down, then reorganise it so the important stuff comes first.

   Whichever approach you take, the next step is the crucial one: cut from the bottom up. The 80/20 rule applies to virtually anything, and copy is no exception. You can actually get rid of most of it and still get your message across. But you don’t need to be quite so radical: cut it by 50% and you’re well on the way to success. The top-down approach is used by journalists, who are taught to write in an inverted pyramid structure (check out the video at that URL if you’re interested).

4. Read it out loud. This is an infallible test for all copy. If it sounds wrong, it’s wrong. But more importantly here, if it sounds long… well, you get the picture. If reading it aloud is a chore, that’s a sure sign that you need to cut it down.

   A variation on this is to give it to somebody else to read, aloud or otherwise. Often, when we’re writing something, we lose our objectivity. It’s why so many people come to me with half-finished copy, or barely started copy where they’ve lost their way and can’t see the wood for the trees.

5. Chase the numbers. Have you ever had to write a Google AdWords advert? I have – in fact it may very well have been responsible for bringing you to my site. AdWords is completely unforgiving when it comes to word count. In fact, it goes beyond that, limiting you to so many characters per heading plus the two lines of your advert. So you have no choice but to bring a razor-sharp focus and endless economy to your ad writing.

   You can do the same thing when you’re writing copy, simply by setting yourself an absolute limit.

   I’ve recently been doing that for blog posts I’ve written for a client. Their CMS limits the number of words, and while the client doesn’t want to exceed that number (they can’t, so they have no choice) the flipside is that they don’t want to undershoot either, and waste valuable words. So I’ve been practising trying to get as close as possible to the limit, saying everything I need to, but without ending too abruptly.

   And you know what? When you want to, you can. All it takes is a little practice. So try chasing the numbers. Impose a limit on yourself, and see if you can hit the target. 

I say it all the time – on this blog, to clients, and to just about anybody who’ll listen: the key to getting people to read what you write is to think like a reader. And that’s easy, because you’re one too. You know you prefer shorter to longer, and that you don’t do detail. 

So keep that in mind when you write, and you’ll rarely go wrong.