Write It Well

25 words makes a good maximum length for most business sentences. So what do you do when a sentence starts mushrooming beyond that comfortable target length?

Start by imagining you’d written this 33-word sentence about Adobe’s cloud-computing software:

Larger businesses, particularly over the past decade, have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it — using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships, for example, or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

Concise writing can start with rearranging a sentence’s main ideas as a series of bullet points, with one idea per item:

• Particularly over the past decade, larger businesses have changed their software use
• They have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it
• Two examples are using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

Teasing out the ideas as separate list items makes them easy to recombine with new transitions:

Particularly over the past decade, larger businesses have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it. Two examples are using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships or Box.net for storage and collaboration.

These new sentences are 18 and 17 words long — the perfect length for a busy customer or client to skim, absorb, and move on from.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Many customers and clients are reluctant to sacrifice significant time on long sentences in Web copy. Here’s a technique to help readers follow your thoughts more quickly.

The following sentence is correctly punctuated, but slightly hard to follow at 41 words long:

And despite the rebuff by Mr. Jobs to the health care executive, Apple ended up adding a number of business-friendly features — like better support for Microsoft Exchange, a common e-mail system inside companies — to a later software update for the iPhone.

Try breaking those flowing lines of text into a bulleted list with one idea per item:

• Mr. Jobs rebuffed the health care executive
• Yet Apple ended up adding a number of business-friendly features to a later software update for the iPhone
• One example was better support for Microsoft Exchange, a common e-mail system inside companies

Reframing these ideas as separate list items sharpens their logic and makes them easy to reassemble as two clear, user-friendly sentences:

Mr. Jobs rebuffed the health care executive, yet Apple ended up adding a number of business-friendly features to a later software update for the iPhone. One example was better support for Microsoft Exchange, a common e-mail system inside companies.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Concision pays off in business writing. The following 45-word question lists six separate San Francisco cafes; it’s about twice the length most sentences should be in marketing or blog copy:

Did their coffee bar and roastery, called Sightglass (after the window in the roaster for checking on the beans), stand a chance in a city that already had Ritual, Four Barrel, and Blue Bottle, not to mention old-timer Graffeo in North Beach and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s?

It’s easy for your ideas to stretch out and get tangled when you’re writing under a deadline. To detangle a sentence quickly, rearrange it as a bulleted list:

• Their coffee bar and roastery is called Sightglass.
• The name is from the roaster window for checking on the beans.
• Does Sightglass stand a chance in a city crowded with cafes?
• The city already had Ritual, Four Barrel, and Blue Bottle, not to mention old-timer Graffeo in North Beach and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s.

A list is an extremely clear format for presenting a series of facts that follow an introductory statement. Since there is no introductory, framing idea here, it’s necessary to reassemble these list items in paragraph form.

Here’s one way to do it. These two 17- and 24-word sentences are much easier for a busy reader to sip at than the big-gulp 45-word sentence above:

Their coffee bar and roastery is called Sightglass, after the roaster window for checking on the beans. Did Sightglass stand a chance in a city that already had Ritual, Four Barrel, Blue Bottle, old-timer Graffeo in North Beach, and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s?

Try using a list when you need to present intricate information concisely and clearly. A list can help you identify your thoughts, contain them in neater punctuation, and hand them to your reader in easy-to-grasp informational servings.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Cookbooks can teach business writers a thing or two about presenting ideas clearly.

Take a look at this slightly revised, 38-word sentence about iPad cooking apps. It’s about twice the length it should be for comfortable reading:

Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy['s] book, The Geometry of Pasta, illustrated entirely in crisp black and white, with all pasta shapes drawn true to size, met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs.

Try treating this sentence the way you’d write out the ingredients for a recipe. First, chop the flowing lines of text into a bulleted list with one item per idea:

• Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy’s book is The Geometry of Pasta
• It’s illustrated entirely in crisp black and white, with all pasta shapes drawn true to size
• It met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs

Once you cut and assemble these related ideas, it’s easy to blend and remix them. 26 and 14 words make for a more appetizing presentation than the single 38-word heap of a sentence above:

Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy book, The Geometry of Pasta, is illustrated entirely in crisp black and white with all pasta shapes drawn true to size. It met Ms. Hildebrand’s goal of designing a visually informative cookbook without any photographs.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Have you ever felt drained just looking at an e-mail that was one long, unbroken paragraph of text? A long sentence can have the same intimidating effect. Here’s an example about the short battery life of the iPhone 4S:

For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue – a spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment – in what has become a typical pattern of silence for the company after customers begin complaining about a technical problem with a new iPhone.

The sentence is 42 words long; we recommend that you keep most sentences in business documents under about 25 words. Breaking up the sentence into separate ideas can help you rewrite it:

• For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue
• A spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment
• This has become a typical pattern of silence for the company
• Customers have complained before about a technical problem with a new iPhone

This separation of ideas makes it much easier to create two or more shorter sentences with new transitions between the ideas:

For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue; a spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. This has become a typical pattern of silence for the company when customers complain about a technical problem with a new iPhone.

Busy readers appreciate having a clear path marked out for them, and these 18- and 22-word sentences are much easier to follow.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Busy readers appreciate it when they can follow your meaning quickly. Some words automatically build suspense; if you don’t use them carefully, they can make your sentences frustrating to read.

Four words that build suspense when they start a sentence are “Although …,” “Despite …,” “Unless ….,” and “While ….” These words usually delay the appearance of the sentence subject — a delay that can frustrate readers.

Here’s an example of a short, well-paced sentence that starts with the suspense-building word “Because”:

Because Amazon is also a retailer and sells an enormous quantity of books, it has a lot more information and access to readers.

Because the sentence is short, a reader gets to the underlined sentence subject quickly. That helps the reader grasp the point and move on.

But a busy reader might get annoyed with the suspenseful buildup behind the word “Because …” if more words came between it and the subject:

Because Amazon is also a retailer, sells an enormous quantity of books, and can give its authors a bigger and more targeted soapbox, it has a lot more information and access to readers.

Keep your sentences short any time you start them with suspense-building words. Or just rearrange your sentences so the subjects come first:

Amazon has a lot more information and access to readers because it is also a retailer, sells an enormous quantity of books, and can give its authors a bigger and more targeted soapbox.

Busy readers will appreciate your getting to the point right away.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes an entire chapter on sentence structure. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Here are two headlines for one online article about folding bicycles. The headlines illustrate how to keep your writing concise:

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We prefer the shorter headline. It’s meant to indicate the topic and encourage readers to click through to the full article. The longer headline introduces the article on a separate webpage.

There’s room for a longer headline on the article page, but in this case the shorter wording says it all.

The article is about one man’s bike use, so the word “life” says as much as the word “lifestyle.” And it’s redundant to mention a “cycling lifestyle” after typing out the word “bike.”

This man can carry his folded bike into restaurants without the hassle of parking. In that way, the bike “makes [a] cycling lifestyle convenient” because it “simplifies life” for him. The longer headline doesn’t add information, and the shorter headline conveys these ideas very neatly.

Busy readers appreciate focused writing. That’s why four words can be better than six!

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Click here for Write It Well’s list of nine quick ways to make your headlines stronger.

Our book Professional Writing Skills shows you how to use verbs skillfully, identify the main action in a long word group, and write concisely. All these skills are necessary to craft effective headlines.

Too busy to make sure your writing is concise? Hire Write It Well to copyedit your documents. We’ll make sure your writing is engaging, clear, and concise so that it makes the best possible impression of your organization.

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In a memo this week, Standards Editor Phil Corbett of the New York Times asked the organization’s writers to avoid the word tweet in most news articles. (A tweet is a message on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Corbett’s rationale is that at the Times,

we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” – as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter – is all three….

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords…. let’s look for deft, English alternatives [to "tweet"]: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update.

In this case, we disagree with the words “jargon” and “deft.” Whether a word is jargon can depend on audience knowledge. We do advise against using recently coined words like tweet without a definition if your readers are unlikely to know them. But it doesn’t take much space to explain that “A tweet is a Twitter post” or that “Tweeting means writing on Twitter.”

The noun tweet is one short word. In comparison, “Twitter message” and “Twitter update” are unnecessarily long, formal, and clumsy phrases. We find it more deft and concise to define the word tweet and then use it freely.

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Later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post.

Retweeting is when a Twitter user clicks a link to add someone else’s tweet to their own Twitter stream. (A tweet is a post on Twitter; see our blog post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more information.)

Retweeting is a way of telling your own Twitter followers, “This tweet is worthwhile.” The “RT” letters at the start of the following Twitter post are a signal that Mary Cullen (M_Cullen) retweeted  (RTed) the following post by Jason Fried (jasonfried):

RT @jasonfried: Jargon is insecurity.

At Write It Well, we’re big fans of plain English over jargon. Jargon in business writing can be a sign of insecurity, or a way to overinflate a simple message to make it look more substantial.

We also admire concise writing. If M_Cullen hadn’t RTed jasonfried’s tweet, we would have missed this pithy, well-phrased statement.

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Later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post.

All this month’s blog posts will be about maintaining a professional image on Twitter. First up is a tweet from the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Twitter account:

Win 8 $100 gift certificates to participating Dine About Town restaurants. Details and contest entry at: http://sfg.ly/doQSZj

At 125 characters (with spaces), this tweet is short and sweet. It’s 15 characters under Twitter’s maximum 140-character limit. With this extra space to burn, we’d suggest two changes.

First, no colon is necessary after “at,” since you’d write “it’s at this webpage” instead of ”it’s at: this webpage.” Also, it might be clearer to spell out the number 8. Winning “eight $100″ certificates would be more immediately clear than “8 $100″ ones.

When you have the space, standard punctuation and full spellings make most tweets clearer.

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See our post “Twitter: Tips for Concise and Professional-Sounding Tweets” for more suggestions about maintaining a professional sound on Twitter. And later this month, Write It Well will post a free PDF with resources and further suggestions about how to get started if you’re interested in using Twitter for your business, but aren’t sure what kind of tweets you’d like to post!