Do you have trouble writing succinctly? You’re not alone.
When people register for my training events, I send them a survey to uncover what they’d most like to learn from the day.
Over the years, one issue has turned up time and again:
How do I write succinctly?
Mark Twain once said ‘I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead’. This says everything about the challenge of writing.
It’s easy to write down everything you want to say about a topic. It’s hard to condense your topic to a strict word limit and just the parts that the reader needs to know using a tone, language and medium that suits them.
So how do you do it?
Don’t try to get it right in the draft
Firstly, I would never advise you to write a perfect piece in the first draft. Great writing takes several stages and the draft is the creative stage.
Here is where you should feel free to write, not think about crafting perfect sentences.
Make time for editing
The next stage is the editing stage, and I can’t overstate its importance. This is where you cull your wordiness and write for your audience – not for you.
This is where overly wordy sentences become more succinct to reveal the real point of interest to the audience:
- Before: It’s obvious to me and, frankly, a lot of people that this industry is undergoing a huge amount of change. This means we’re going to have to evolve and change the way we do things.
- After: This industry is changing dramatically and we need to change the way we do things.
Don’t skip the planning stage
However, there is a first stage before drafting and editing, which is where the real solution to this problem lies – the planning stage.
If you don’t plan out your writing, you’re likely to write far more than you intend – and go off track, discuss issues that aren’t relevant and perhaps not even address the initial question or problem.
Planning doesn’t have to be a big deal. Business writers are always under the pump, so we don’t need a task that takes an hour.
See how I do it
To write this blog post, I wrote one sentence that summarised my idea:
‘So many business writers ask about the challenge of writing succinctly. I need to provide simple solutions to help them get better at writing succinctly but within the constraints of business writing.’
Then I wrote 3 points that I want to make:
- Don’t try to write succinctly in a draft. The draft is the creative stage.
- You need to plan before you draft so you know who it’s for and what you’re trying to achieve. You’re less likely to stray and write more than you need to.
- You need to edit anything that doesn’t meet the initial goals of your planning.
Make good writing choices
Writing is about making choices. If you’re writing too much, you’re not making enough choices.
Make those choices in the planning stage, then you let your inner content expert loose in the draft stage (within the confines of your choices) and then reinforce those choices in the editing stage by cutting out what doesn’t help the reader.
Still struggling to write succinctly?
If you’re still struggling, your topic might be too big for your word limit. You’re trying to cover too much at a time. Reconsider your medium: is a blog post appropriate or would a video be better? Or should you break it down into a series?
For example, I could do a 2-hour workshop on this topic, but right now I’m doing a 700-word blog post. I have to make hard choices about what you most need from me.
So use the planning phase to figure out how much you can cover – don’t try to work it out as you’re drafting. It’s too late then, as you’ll end up with way too much content, which is harder to edit later.
Want to know more?
To learn more about this and other writing challenges:
- join us at our upcoming conferences in Brisbane and Perth
- request a personalised in-house workshop that unpicks the specific writing challenges that your team faces.