Everything should be shorter, Part 1

We kick off a new series on business English with some invaluable ideas for saving you and your organsation time and trouble

Photo by Sies Kranen on Unsplash

Why do organisations get in touch to ask about writing classes? In a word – frustration.

Invariably, the first contact comes from a senior person, usually in communications, marketing or HR, but occasionally CEOs and COOs too.

Why are they frustrated? Because they are spending too much time correcting poorly written or unclear writing. They see the bright people who work for them struggling to convey their ideas. They are bothered about mistakes – in grammar, spelling, punctuation and so on.

But worse still is the time they waste passing multiple versions of the same document or presentation between themselves. And worst of all is when they get negative feedback from above (bosses) or outside (clients).

So, in this blog we go deeply into the way business and organisations write. We look at grammar, jargon, how to edit and how to cope with the blank page. We’re very interested in people’s relationship with writing, their writing biography – because we all have one. We delve into how writing flows around and between teams – who edits, who checks, who has the ultimate sign-off.

After the sessions, we get asked to send the presentations and other material we’ve used. We have also produced bespoke style sheets and style guides.

This new-style Forthwrite blog is an opportunity for anyone, client of ours or not, to get a look at that material and benefit from all the hard thinking and hard-earned experience that goes into the courses.

Here’s how it works

The blog will come in two parts. Part One (like the article you’re reading) is what journalists call a think piece. We take a topic that’s relevant to anyone who uses business English. It might be jargon. It might be the growth and implications of AI. We look at the things we write – social media posts, proposals, thought leadership pieces – but also in granular detail at the tools we use to write: tenses, bullet points, verbs and the like.

That will be free to all subscribers.

Part 2 will be ruthlessly practical. We’ve heard what the issue is in Part One: here’s how to fix it.

If you save all the Part 2 material, you’ll soon have a punchy, accessible and very handy guide to help you and your colleagues write more productively and effectively. For that reason, the Part 2 content will only be accessible to paying subscribers. It’s valuable stuff, this.

So, if you’re interested in how business English is evolving, how it works and when it doesn’t, you should find plenty to interest you in the Part 1 articles. But if you want to see an immediate difference in the way you and your colleagues write, opt for Part 2 as well.

To begin with: the golden rule

Everything should be shorter.

If you remember one thing when you sit down to write – and, even more so, when you have finished what you're writing, it’s this. Everything should be shorter. Make it shorter. Shorter.

You have 80 slides. Make it 30. You have nine bullet points on the slides, two infographics and a picture. Make that five bullets and one visual.

But really, focus on the nuts and bolts of your writing.

Start with words. If you utilise words like utilise instead of use, you are already heading towards polysyllabic purgatory. Once we’ve had a hard talk about long abstract nouns, you might be a little less promiscuous with your use of words like strategy, sustainability and authenticity.

Then we’ll get our secateurs* out and attack the tangled foliage of the corporate sentence. We’ll hack away at the subclauses and the dangling modifiers. We might need to do some serious pollarding and take the sentences right back to their naked state: subject + verb + object.

We will relieve some of the tension when it comes to tenses. We’ll venture into the foggy realms where the conditional tense proliferates and rare and dangerous species like the subjunctive dwell.

(Maybe we should be hard on writers who mix their metaphors too).

Making things shorter is a good, satisfying and even pleasurable experience – a bit like getting a great haircut or mowing the lawn.

But there is a serious purpose. We all spend a lot of time – most of it – doing what the writer Cal Newport calls ‘shallow’ work. That’d be sitting in meetings, video calls and presentations, chatting to people and writing emails….hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of emails.

How you divide your day into the deep work that matters a lot and the shallow work that’s necessary, but matters a lot less, is going to make a big difference to your organisation and its value to your career.

But whether it’s deep work – composing a presentation, a paper, even a blog – or the shallow stuff, I can show you how you can spend less time writing. And the less time you spend writing, the shorter it is, and the less time people spend reading and listening to it.

When your email is greeted by groans

What my colleague expected when he penned an email…

The actual response Photo by Pawel Chu on Unsplash

Wouldn’t it be great to be – or to have been – Mark Twain? Half the memorable quotes in the world are attributed to him (the other half to Winston Churchill).

One of his best known is this:

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Like all great and pithy sayings, it’s a paradox which captures what you might describe as a professional truth. Anyone who has written for a living knows that the editing – either for space, or because, well, everything should be shorter – is where the hard work begins. Genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration and The harder I practice the luckier I get belong to the same genre.

Is ‘Twain’ contradicting what I said above about productivity? On the face of it, yes: it is quicker to splurge out a whole load of words off the top of your head and not worry about honing them down to a manageable length.

But in the long run, you make more work for everyone - and yourself – by splurging words.

I had a colleague once who wrote a minimum of 300 words per email and cc’d it to everyone. Result: people stopped reading them.

He’d then send a follow-up 450-word email wondering why no one had taken any notice of the first one.

He was effective in meetings but again, like the majority of people I’ve worked with, always said too much. Writing or speaking, we all need editing. It took me years to learn that. As I am an editor, it shouldn't have.

Who said what?

You’ll have noticed that I put ‘Twain’ in quote marks as a way of hinting that this celebrated aphorism wasn’t in fact, his. He might have said it, once, but thanks to the excellent Quote Investigator it would appear he was simply repeating what had been a writerly truism for at least a century – and even longer, if you believe that the Roman writer Cicero got in there first.

So, let’s get to work

The first lesson on how to write shorter, crisper business English is here. It includes:

The problem with nouns

How to crop polysyllables

A cure for overstuffed sentences

9 words you should always replace.

Prefer the live experience?

I run writing classes on my own, but these days I prefer to work with a brilliant editor called Kerry Smith. Because we like short and plain words, and, well, because it’s our names, we are Smith + Jones.

*The gardening tools as opposed to the sentences that do, or more usually don’t, follow in a logical sequence. They are sequiturs, or non-sequiturs.