If you’re reading this, you probably read a lot. You’ve made your way through all our industry news, keeping tabs on trends in our feature stories and gleaning a greater understanding of your own business—at least we hope so.
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And if you read this much, it may be that you do a fair amount of writing yourself. ChatGPT notwithstanding, people still must write to communicate.
But every once in a while, in the midst of a long day of editing, I’ll look skyward and then scratch a whole phrase or paragraph from a manuscript. Usually it’s because it’s the umpteenth time I’ve seen it in the several articles we prepare for a single issue of Quality Digest.
Not that I’m complaining. Bad writing provides editors a certain degree of job security (though perhaps now to a lesser degree with the advent of artificial intelligence, which will eventually write the stuff and read it, too).
But for people who do aspire to write well—or at least better—I’m happy to offer advice in the fond hope of seeing it manifest in future manuscripts. If I’m tired of or annoyed by writing that’s unclear, ambiguous, hard to penetrate, or just plain long and boring, it’s likely the reader is, too. And if you’re a writer, the reader should be your first worry.
Time for a kaizen blitz
The business of editing finds its counterpart in the quality field. Writing a first draft is only the beginning. Good writing owes to kaizen—continuous improvement. It’s not a simple matter of keyboard skills and being glib. A first draft is an occasion for a kaizen blitz, an immediate quality check.
The editing process is well described as making the writing more lean. Apply the 5S method:
• Sort (seiri)
• Set in order (seiton)
• Shine (seiso)
• Standardize (seiketsu)
• Sustain (shitsuke)
These are excellent steps to improve your writing. To sort your facts (seiri), take the time to jot at least a rough outline to decide exactly what you want to say. This flows into putting the facts in order (seiton). Now comes the shine (seiso): Delete things that are repeated, repair long or clumsy sentences, take out extra words (more on this in a bit), and delete those phrases that you thought were especially witty but now require extra work to keep. (“Murder your darlings” is sound writing advice; in quality terms, perhaps “Muda, your darlings.”) To standardize (seiketsu), make sure that you call one thing or one process by one name; don’t give the same thing several different names.
And what of sustain? To an editor, this means you decide whether what is written is understandable, useful, and will stand up to review. Are you telling readers anything they don’t already know? You should be.
Less really is more
If you can say the same thing in fewer words, do that—it’s the better way. We’re not talking about poetry or finely turned prose. It’s not Melville spending a chapter or two on the topic of whale’s teeth. It’s a matter of being able to say more in the same space.
This seems less important today than it was in 1897 when The New York Times adopted its slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The meaning of fit was not merely suitable; accounting for ads, the available space was finite and brevity was a must. If you could use fewer words, you could say more in the allotted space.
Brevity is still a worthy goal. Even though a web page can let an article go on forever, the reader might not. Various sources define a range of 1,000–4,000 words for a feature story. However, if you look around at the top end of that range, you’ll see fewer readers.
But before you cut whole sentences or paragraphs to fit a given range, you can improve your writing by deleting superfluous words and phrases.
I’ve heard more than one editor compare editing to hedge-trimming, especially for a poorly written or cumbersome story. As my first boss put it, “You want to cut all the dead wood out of there. It’ll make the bush look better.” Another editor, having just heard a lengthy, unedited sentence I read to him in amazement, remarked, “You work your way in there, the branches close up behind you, and you find yourself in a very dark place.”
For the sake of brevity, clarity, and your readers, here are some ways to shorten your stories, press releases, marketing pieces, white papers, and emails. Once you start cutting, you’ll be surprised at how quickly the hot air escapes.
Start with meaningless phrases and qualifiers
The list below runs counter to my plea for brevity. Australian “digital content specialists” 4 Syllables compiled a much longer list for you to peruse, but here is part of its sampling of extra words everyone can do without. I’ve listed them alphabetically by the essential word; delete the words in parentheses.
brief (in duration) |
(past) history |
To those I would add a few of my own favorite deletions:
• In such a way that = so
• A wide variety of = several
• A majority of = most
• At present = now
And furthermore:
Currently: When asked for the time of day, Yogi Berra, baseball’s all-time master of malaprops, would ask, “You mean now?” The word currently begs the same question. Unless something is different from before, or will soon change, currently doesn’t tell us much. “He is currently the CEO” becomes “He is the CEO” unless he was just named or is on his way out.
Impact (and all its ugly siblings, especially impacted—which ought to be for teeth—and impactful, a made-up word that’s a mistake based on an error): My initial objection is that it’s a noun, not a verb. But the misuse has gained widespread currency, and I get it: Spoken or written, the word packs a punch. Pow! Bam! Impact! But it’s wrong. Unless you’ve embedded it so deeply in a sentence that it can’t be extricated, at my desk your manuscript is going to suffer an impact every time you misuse the word.
Leverage: “Acme will leverage its expertise to…” oh, whatever. Again, the word’s a noun, not a verb. Furthermore, it’s just jargon for utilize, which is a fancier way of saying use. Other appropriate synonyms abound.
Very: Let’s say something is big. Now let’s say it’s very big. The reader still has no idea of how big or how much bigger. Mark Twain’s advice was to replace the word very with damn, because “… your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Do you worry that deleting your fanciest terms and phrases will make your writing less impressive or diminish the cachet of your masterpiece? Don’t. My mother, an editor and English teacher, gave me advice that you should follow, too:
• “Don’t use a $10 word there. It just makes you look cheap.”
• “‘Everyone else is doing it’ is no excuse.” (OK, that usually wasn’t about writing. Still...)
Prefer the familiar. If there’s a simpler word that will do the same work, use it. Save the extraordinary word for when it’s truly needed. Once you start down this road, you’ll recognize other opportunities to make your writing leaner without sacrificing any of its meaning.
Bizspeak vs. English
Editing Quality Digest, I see plenty of “bizspeak” proudly written to be understood only by a chosen few. If you object to the jargon, those writers might say, “Well, you just wouldn’t understand”—to which I would reply, “Try me. Say it in English.”
Far more qualified to challenge that gobbledygook is Bryan A. Garner, author of Garner’s Modern English Usage (Oxford University Press, fifth edition, 2022). When I set out to support this point about bizspeak, I immediately hit the jackpot. The first thing that came up in my search was Garner’s 2013 article in Harvard Business Review, “A Bizspeak Blacklist,” which begins:
“It’s mission-critical to be plain-spoken, whether you’re trying to be best-of-breed at outside-the-box thinking or simply incentivizing colleagues to achieve a paradigm shift in core-performance value-adds. Leading-edge leveraging of your plain-English skill set will ensure that your actionable items synergize future-proof assets with your global-knowledge repository.
“Just kidding.”
All of us have suffered through paragraphs like Garner’s example. Some of us have even written or been forced to write such paragraphs—most painfully, when the corporate review process produces a “horse by committee.” It’s comforting to read Garner’s following paragraph:
“Seriously, though, it’s important to write plainly. You want to sound like a person, not an institution. But it’s hard to do, especially if you work with people who are addicted to buzzwords. It takes a lot of practice.”
As usual, Garner is correct. Practice makes perfect. But in the pursuit of perfection, we can write less, write it better, and spare everyone the suffering. Best of all, the reader will have something much better to read.
Don’t ever forget: The reader is why you’re writing.
Comments
Hear, hear!
This made my little writing-nerd heart go pitty-pat. Saving it as a reminder to be revisited several times per year.
Clarity and simplicity!
Very nice. Great connection to continuous improvement principles.
Smart Brevity
A recent book on this topic is Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. I found it insightful.
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