Jenny Morse, PhD
Author and CEO

Our professional writing has to be concise because, unfortunately, no one wants to read anything. Most of the people who are reading your messages or are writing to you are doing so because they need to get things done, or we need them to get things done. They need to have information. Rather than reading to enjoy your emails, like they would a good book, they are reading the message trying to figure out: Why are you writing to me? And, what am I supposed to do with this?

Because the purpose of business writing is to communicate information, we want to make our messages short, while still maintaining a considerate tone—so our audience’s like us and want to work with us. We don’t want our messages to just be short, because short messages can come across as not very nice. If a message is too short, it might feel abrupt or harsh or brusque or rude because it doesn't have any of the signals in it that make messages feel kind.

This balance of short and nice is why business writing should be concise: brief yet effective. Often, the goal of concise means figuring out the shortest possible sentence and then taking one step backward—adding one or two words back to keep the tone gentle.

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A quote by William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well is an example of how you can think about writing concise messages and making every word count. William Zinsser says, “Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.” In other words, when we write concisely, we want to review every word we put on paper and see which ones we can eliminate.

So, here's a question for you: Can you take Zinsser's message about conciseness and make it more concise? Are there any words here that you can eliminate without changing the meaning of the message? I believe you can find seven words that you could remove without changing the meaning of the sentence. For example, if we said,

“Examine every word you put on paper.”

“Examine every word you write.”

“Write,” here, serves the same function as “put on paper.” Three words drops to one word.

“You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose.”

“You'll find some don't serve any purpose.”

And you probably know you can take “that” out.

With just a few quick edits, we can take Zinsser’s message about conciseness and remove seven words without changing the meaning of the message.

“Examine every word you write. You'll find some don't serve any purpose.”

More concise.

Can you make this message shorter? Sure. If you try again, you can take out some words, but it's going to start to affect the meaning. You might come up with something like this sentence, where you’ve combined the two ideas into one:

“Make every word you write serve a purpose.”

But now, instead of a suggestion—a kind of conversation—the sentence starts to sound more like an instruction: here's what you should do. And so, it's changing the tone with which we receive that message.

Let's try one more time. Can you make this even shorter? Maybe you’ve come up with something like:

“Every word should serve a purpose.”

You could keep going to make this sentence even shorter. In fact, sometimes I do an exercise where I have people reduce a paragraph to one word. So, you can make it shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter. The thing we want to recognize is that shorter isn't necessarily more effective, and this is what we mean when we're talking about the balance between short and effective. When we're moving from, “Examine every word you put on paper. You'll find a surprising number that don't serve any purpose,” you can hear it’s conversational. Somebody's talking to you. They're giving you advice.

When we get to, “Every word should serve a purpose,” there's no personality there. There's no tone. If Zinsser had written this “shorter” sentence, we probably wouldn’t want to read much more of his book. So, tone matters. Tone allows us, through our messages, to connect with the audience. “Examine every word you write. You'll find some don't serve any purpose,” might be a more concise version of Zinsser’s quote because the tone is still the same. But, if we continue to eliminate, we’ll change the tone, and that will affect the way the audience will receive that message.

Both of these examples of “shorter” messages demonstrate the need for us to not only write shorter messages, but to write shorter messages which also make people feel good. And, this is what we want to think about when we’re using the word “concise.” It's the balance between short and effective. It asks us to make every word count.

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