Quick tip: Get to the point
Did you hesitate before clicking on this tip?
Even though it’s labeled “quick”?
Then you know just how your white paper readers feel.
No one is waiting on the edge of their chair for your white paper to arrive.
B2B prospects are busy! They have:
- Too much to read
- Too much to think about
- Too much to do
- Interruptions from all directions
And their boss just dropped another big project on their desk.
That’s why every sentence you write for them must get to the point.
Omit needless words
Struck & White put this eloquently in Principle of Composition No. 17 in The Elements of Style:
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for their same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
That’s my favorite passage in that entire little jewel of a book. And I try to follow it in everything I write.
How do you write concisely?
I’ll tell you the secret right now: Write. And then rewrite.
And then do it again. And again.
And every time you rewrite, try to cut and compress.
I routinely do at least five drafts before I send anything to a client.
And each draft, even the fourth or fifth, I try to cut at least 10% of the words.
It’s easy to see your word count. That’s built into Word and GDocs. So watch your word count, and bring it down.
That’s the secret. There is no shortcut. There is no other way.
We all write flabby sentences on our first go
Abd the only way to whip those first-draft sentences into shape is to exercise them.
And the way to do that is to concentrate, condense, confine, consolidate, compact, compress, cram, curtail, cut, deflate, delete, digest, downsize, flatten, pack, précis, prune, reduce, reshape, restrict, revise, scrunch, shorten, shrink, slim down, squeeze, squish, sum up, taper, tighten, trim, and tuck.
So do it.
If you want to be a professional writer who can write better than any AI, learn to get to the point.
For more quick tips on writing, get my free newsletter White Paper World
