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Ways to Cut the Fluff in Your Writing
Give your reader’s brain a break. Share clear and concise content.
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A colleague once shared with me his experience of briefs for government officials. Brief writers would write something like 5 pages.
Then the government official’s adviser would share a cutdown version while they were in the car on the way to an event.
It was like giving a brief on the brief. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?
But I’m guilty of it sometimes. How about you?
I fluff to fill in the gaps. Because I’m used to using a phrase. Or because I haven’t spent enough time editing. When speaking it’s like waffling instead of getting to the point.
We need to write more concisely and clearly when we’ve got our reader’s attention for a short time. When we have limited space to share content such as on an app. An information kiosk. Or on an error message box.
Brains slurp energy
We need to choose fewer, better words so we don’t exhaust our readers. We need to write 50% less text online than we would write in print.
You see, it’s been found the brain constantly slurps up huge amounts of energy, more than any other human organ. It uses up to 20% of our body’s…