Two simple ways to make your writing better

Clarity and brevity. Enough said.

Yes, yes, I know that the best blogs, the ones written by people with Very Big Megaphones standing on Very Big Soapboxes have ‘Top 10 ways to write lists of Top 10 lists’ and so on. But if there’s a trend to be bucked, or a convention to be broken, then in the immortal words of Wham! I’m your man. So not five, or four, or three, but two. Two simple ways that’ll make a significant difference to the quality of your written output.

We speak geek

Just the other day, I was talking to a client about technology. Now this is an area I’m comfortable in, having spent more years than I care to remember with my shoulder to the IT wheel. So we chatted about SaaS and XML, about CSS and VPNs, RFID and NFC. And I suddenly realised that if the proverbial Martian were beamed into our virtual midst, he’d stare open-mouthed at us, wondering if his in-built English translator was working correctly. And it’s not just Martians. Because for most people, techspeak is baffling. In fact, specialised jargon of any sort is baffling. When you’re talking in a closed environment to somebody who speaks your esoteric language, you tend to forget how specialised it is. And it doesn’t much matter, as you’re on the same wavelength. It’s when you go outside that environment that the problems start. I remember years ago being in a high-level meeting around a gorgeous walnut table on the 25th floor of a bank. My colleague – a systems engineer – said to the assembled great and the good, “Let’s take that topic offline. I don’t think we have the bandwidth at the moment.” This was in the days before techspeak started to leak into our everyday conversation, so he was met with a look of blank incomprehension. I came to the rescue. “Let’s talk about it outside this meeting,” I said in a near-simultaneous translation, “because we don’t really have the time at the moment.” They all nodded sagely. It’s only when you’re outside your comfort zone (itself insider jargon that’s jumped the barrier) that we realise how impenetrable all this stuff is. The day after my IT conversation, I got a call from somebody asking if I’d be interested in writing about derivatives. “Tell me a bit more about the project,” I said, just to sound a little less at sea than I felt. And to play for time. So he told me. All of the words made sense – sort of. That is, I could identify them as English, and had heard them all before, though not necessarily in the order or context he used them in. The acronyms didn’t help things either, and they came thick and fast. So I did the only thing I could – decline the job, while helpfully suggesting he’d save time, money, effort and frustration by finding a financial copywriter. In his case, jargon is excusable: he’s in a specialist market, with a specialist audience. But most of us aren’t. If you’re a specialist talking to a generalist, uninitiated audience – your clients, for example – you need to simplify, explain and demystify. Way number 1: lose the jargon. PDQ.

Short and tweet

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an executive summary for a long document I was working on. And then a strange thought occurred to me: if the document is aimed at busy executives (which it was) and they read the executive summary (which they will, because they’re busy) then why bother with the rest of the document? A sobering thought – and a valuable lesson. Anything you can write in two pages can be cut down to one. And from one to a half. And from a paragraph to a sentence. It’s just that most of the time, we don’t have to cut. Unless we’re forced to – by Twitter, for example. The 140-character limit really focuses the mind. You can’t waffle because it won’t let you . So you don’t. Instead, you become a paragon of brevity, concision and focus. The limit is a legacy. After all, most people nowadays don’t actually tweet using text messages, with their in-built maximum of 140 characters. Instead, they tweet directly online, using computers, smartphones or tablets. So they could, in theory, send longer messages. It’s just that Twitter doesn’t allow them that luxury. So they get it down in as few words as possible. And that’s what you should do. Set yourself a word limit, or a page limit – and stick to it. Then stop. Way number 2: keep it short. Cut it. Remember the reader. Cut it again. Find out more:

Thanks and goodbye. The Webby Awards limit acceptance speeches to just five words. If only the Oscars could do the same.

Kevin Writing.