This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
You can access the full web based course at writertraining.online.
Information about face to face courses is at thinkwrite.com.au
Don’t use more words than you need
Another thing to do at the word level is to cut the clutter. More words than are needed. Just get in the way of good communication. They’re going to slow down your reader – they have to process more words. So let’s eliminate those words that aren’t necessary in our communication.
Have a look at this sentence here. It’s typical organisational speak. My guess is you’ve seen something like this.
It’s important that we examine the future implications of merging these departments together.
Yeah, you could write it that way. Here’s another way of writing.
We must examine the implications of merging these departments.
Let me take you through my thinking.
If it is important, then we must do it. Although I would acknowledge there’s a bit of a change in the shade of meaning there, but roll with it, it’s a possibility.
If it’s an implication, it will be in the future. I can get rid of that word.
If they are going to be merged, they will be together. I can get rid of that word.
What I’m trying to do is to pull out or extract those words that aren’t adding anything to the meaning, words that are just taking up space. So I want to pull those words out because I want to maximise meaning and minimise reading for my reader.
Let me show you this example. It’s an old one, but it still amuses me. I was working on a project with one of our big 4 consulting firms some years ago and this is what one of their people wrote.
To provide an indicative view of the expected implementation costs for the high performance delivery pipeline, an order of magnitude cost estimate relating to the delivery pipeline transformation of Kana is outlined in the table below.
Kana was a software programme. And would you have a look at the value of that table? Can you see all the different comparisons that are being made? The wealth of information that’s there. Well, it certainly takes up a few lines, takes up a bit of space. Sometimes you’d swear consultants are being paid by the kilogramme.
So we’ve got this table there that’s not really adding much value. We’ve got the ‘order of magnitude cost estimate’. All these types of words. All we really needed to say was this.
It is likely to cost 2 to 3 million to implement KANA.
What we’re trying to do is to eliminate those unnecessary words. You see every sentence, every phrase, every word, anything you put on a page needs to aid the communication. It needs to add something to the meaning for the reader.
Now there’s a second set of exercises in the file associated with this unit, and this time there’s a whole bunch of what I call clutter phrases. These are phrases that I suspect may still be coming across your desk. What I’d like you to do is to have a look at each of these phrases and see if you can simplify. Sometimes you can simplify them by just replacing the entire phrase with a different word. Other times you’ll just pull out the unnecessary word that’s part of that phrase. Pause the video now and have a go at that.
Access the complete course at writertraining.online