Using more words than you have to can bury the core purpose of a message.
CONCISE SHORT SENTENCES
common complaint from people about the text they have to read is that it's too wordy. Using more words than you have to can bury the core purpose of a message. And it forces readers to work harder to identify what you mean, which wastes time.
In all writing, it's vital to be concise.
Concise writing is clear, focused, and uncluttered. It conveys ideas in as few words as possible, without watering them down.
You can use four simple techniques for writing more concisely:
Readers lose attention when text contains long sentences. This makes it more likely they'll miss vital information or have to read the same text more than once.
So, ideally, you should aim to include a maximum of 15 to 17 words per sentence.
Where possible, write some longer sentences as well as short ones to add more variety and rhythm to your writing. Remember, text can become rigid and boring if all sentences are the same length.
The following is a lengthy, boring message:
"It has come to my attention that we need to rectify our printer error message situation, and to accomplish this goal, I'm communicating with the repair service today,"
It can be rewritten more concisely as:,/p>
"We need to fix our printer, so I'm calling the repair service today."
The easiest way to keep sentences short and to the point is to ensure you include only one idea in each sentence.
A badly written example is:
"We should involve marketing, who incidentally have been quite successful in their latest campaign to sell more textbooks, in the development of this new product."
It contains more than one idea.
Consider how you would make the following sentence more concise.
"In conclusion, we should involve the design team, which is working on a project that has some interesting connections with the new assignment and with other green marketing campaigns, and is going well so far, in the research of images for the new assignment."
How the sentence can be revised for clarity?
You probably found it difficult to follow this long, somewhat rambling sentence. And you likely had to read it a couple of times to figure out the main point. There are too many ideas crammed into the sentence. You might revise it by splitting it up this way:
"In conclusion, we should involve the design team in the research of images for the new assignment. The team is working on a project that has some interesting connections with this assignment and with other green marketing campaigns. That project is going well so far."
The length and clutter of the original text is altered significantly by splitting the sentence into three more manageable sentences, each with its own idea.
The first step in making the sample sentence more concise is to reduce the number of words. The original sentence contains 61 words.
The sentence reads:
"In conclusion, we should involve the design team in the research of images which is working on a project that has some interesting connections that will benefit the new assignment and other green marketing campaigns, and because the team's project is going well so far it should finish off to start with the research of images for the new assignment soon."
But it can easily be split into three sentences, each containing its own idea. This makes it easier to follow.
The sentence is split into three separate ones:
"In conclusion, we should involve the design team to research images for our new assignment."
"The team has some interesting connections that will benefit this assignment and future green marketing campaigns."
"It will be ready to start work soon because its current project is going well."
QUESTION
Which guidelines do you follow when determining the length of your sentences?
You should aim to include a maximum of 15 to 17 words and one idea per sentence.
Text can become rigid and boring if all sentences are the same length. Varying the sentence length a bit provides variety and rhythm to your writing.
IReaders' attention can start to wane if your text contains sentences that are overly long. As a result, they may miss crucial information or misunderstand your point.
When sentences are too long, they become unwieldy and difficult to follow. Often, people try to put too many ideas into one sentence. Aim to put one idea in each of your sentences and your writing will not only be more concise but also more clear.
Writing one long sentance is a pitfall writers sometimes fall into. In fact, you should try to focus each sentence on one idea.
I have been teaching and training agents, team leaders, supervisors, managers and admins of call centers and other businesses in BPO related fields. This series, comes as a result of that experience. I have more than 4,000 modules that I plan on sharing here. This is # 003-08
