Write Tight

As you increase your words, you decrease their impact.

Communicate your thoughts in short sentences. Those thoughts will be remembered, and you will, too.

Shorter hits harder.

I read a book by a man who is a deep thinker, a great strategist, and a good writer. His strengths are that he can identify, organize, and communicate key ideas.

But those ideas would hit harder if the man could write tighter.

Tight writers

1. reject unnecessary modifiers.

2. reduce the word count.

3. prove what they say.

4. use active voice.

Modifiers:

Adjectives and adverbs are fatty foods. They give energy to your story when used sparingly but cause your sentences to feel bloated, sluggish and fat if you overindulge. Adjectives are less dangerous like good cholesterol, and adverbs are more dangerous like bad cholesterol, but a steady diet of these modifiers will clog the arteries of your story and slow it down until your audience falls asleep.

Word count:

Editing will reduce your word count, but it is hard to edit what is freshly written. Look at it the next day and your mistakes will become obvious to you. Rearrange, reduce, and eliminate elements until your story is woven tightly and shines brightly.

You can communicate twice as much by using half as many words.

Willie Shakespeare taught us, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”1

Blaise Pascal and Benjamin Franklin are remembered for their wit. This is why both of them apologized in writing when they took too long to say too little.

Blaise Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales of 1657, wrote, “The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.”

Likewise, Benjamin Franklin concluded his 1750 Letter to the Royal Society in London by saying, “I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”

Prove what you say:

A rainbow of people across the internet report that Martin Luther, Mark Twain, and Cicero of Rome made statements similar to the statements made by Blaise Pascal and Benjamin Franklin, but none of those colorful people can offer meaningful documentation.

Martin Luther died in 1546. A biography of Luther published 300 years later – in 1846 –quotes Luther as having said he “didn’t have time to make it shorter,” but the biographer could cite no text left behind by Martin Luther to support that quote.

Mark Twain died in 1910. In 1975 an article that appeared in the Chicago Tribune attributed a version of the “didn’t have time to make it shorter” statement to Twain, but the journalist could offer no text, no chapter, no page number, no contemporaneous witness as proof.

The person claiming that Cicero said he “didn’t have time to make it shorter” cites a book of quotes published in 1824 as “proof” of what Cicero supposedly said 1,800 years before that book of quotes was published. Cicero left behind no writings that contain that quote.

“Do not believe what you read on the internet.” – Albert Einstein

Use active voice:

Passive voice:

“The sword is carried by me,” is passive because the subject – “The sword” – is acted upon by the verb.

Active voice:

“I carry the sword,” is active because the subject – “I” – takes the action.

Sentences spoken in active voice command attention.

Sentences spoken in passive voice are easily ignored.

A child becomes an adult when they say, “I broke the cookie jar,” instead of, “The cookie jar got broken.”

Don’t speak like a child. Let the subject take the action in every sentence you speak and write.

Here’s an Example:

Like the man I mentioned earlier, Matt Willis is a deep thinker, a great strategist, and a good writer. But unlike that man, Matt is also a good ad writer. Matt recently wrote a marvelous 575-word blog post. But so what? Lots of people can write good blog posts. But the writer who can reduce his word count by 84% and punch his message home in just 94 words… that, my friend, is an ad writer.

These are the 94 words.

You can read them out loud in just 30 seconds.

Advertising agencies are the pythons of advertising. They measure you, size you up, and then eat you. You wanted to grow, so you hired the pythons. The pythons wanted to grow, too. So they measured your ad budget, convinced you to increase it, then took the biggest bite they could. The Wizards of Ads don’t bite. We work for a monthly salary. You increase it once per year by the same percentage your top-line grew. We triple your business. You triple our pay. Get out of the snake pit. Go to WizardOfAds.com

Roy H. Williams

1 spoken by Polonius, in act 2, scene 2 of Hamlet.

Scott Mautz ran several of Procter &Gamble’s multi-billion dollar businesses, so he is obviously an effective leader. Scott now hosts free leadership classes on LinkedIn that have attracted more than two million registrants. He teaches people to work out daily. But no sit-ups, pull-ups, bench presses, or squats. Scott believes in rigorous mental workouts to increase your boldness, fortify your fortitude, and build your decision-making muscles. He has developed 50 different “mental strength” exercises, so after just one session, Roving reporter Rotbart now has Schwarzenegger-style mental muscles. Ready for a workout? Go to MondayMorningRadio.com