The only business writing book you’ll ever need - Laura Brown, Rich Karlgaard 2019
Step 4: Be concise
The seven steps
“Most of the e-mails I get should be 30—50% shorter than they are.”
—SURVEY RESPONDENT
In Step 1 you got the ask clear, in Step 2 you tailored your message for your reader, and in Step 3 you wrote a strong beginning. In this step, you’ll learn to make your writing more concise.
In the business writing survey I conducted for this book, 87 percent of respondents indicated that writing more concisely was a priority for them, and 63 percent said they wished their colleagues would write more concisely.
The ability to write concisely has a lot of benefits—for your reader, obviously, and also for you. Concise writing tends to get a better response, because your readers will quickly learn what you want. If you get in the habit of writing concisely, you’ll spend less time writing and you’ll agonize less over what you write. You’ll also spend less time following up with people who didn’t understand—or didn’t even read—what you wrote. Finally, if you make it a habit, you’ll get a reputation as someone who’s straightforward and doesn’t waste people’s time—and everyone likes that kind of colleague.
For most of us, writing concisely doesn’t come naturally, especially when we’re in a hurry. When we’re in a rush, we tend to write whatever comes into our heads, and it’s often muddy, wordy, and too long. It takes a little time to break the habit of going on too long. As you practice, it begins to come more naturally.
Before we get started, a little caveat: shorter is not always better. Sometimes you want a particular tone or style that involves longer sentences, more explanation, or repetition to drive your point home. The key is to do whatever you do—whether writing concisely or more expansively—by choice, not from lack of skill.
Writing concisely involves learning a few editing techniques. There are practically endless ways to edit your writing, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you even start. In this section, you’ll learn a quick, practical method that will cover about 90 percent of your problems with wordiness. If you want to learn even more, look at the section on editing your own writing later in the book (see here).
To give you the power to make your sentences more concise, we’re going to look at a little grammar (not too much, I promise). Here are four tips you can use to cut the chaff in your writing:
1.Watch for forms of the verb “to be”: (“is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” “has been,” “have been,” etc.).
2.Watch for prepositional phrases.
3.Watch for nominalizations (explained below).
4.Watch for padding.
If you can detect just these four patterns in your own writing and learn to make adjustments when you find them, you will greatly improve your prose and make your readers’ lives much easier.
Quick guide . . .
. . . to Making Your Writing More Concise
1Watch for forms of the verb to be (am, is, are, was, were, has been, have been)
Turn passive constructions into active ones:
X is done by Y → Y does X
Consider rewriting sentences that begin with there is, there are, it is.
2Watch for prepositional phrases
If you have strings of phrases beginning with words like in, on, of, by, around, about, and between, consider rephrasing them:
the permission of the customer → the customer’s permission
in many circumstances → often
3Watch for nominalizations
“Nominalization” means turning a word into a noun. Typically, nominalizations are verbs that have been turned into nouns, which then require a verb for use in a sentence. Convert these phrases back to the original verbs:
reach an agreement = agree
make a decision = decide
achieve a balance = balance
suffer a loss = lose
have a response = respond
conduct an investigation = investigate
engage in a search = search
4Watch for padding
Look out for redundancies:
7 a.m. in the morning
absolutely essential
meet together
basic fundamentals
future plans
final conclusion
lag behind
Look out for “filler” words and phrases that don’t add meaning:
actually
in many ways
essentially
at the end of the day
foundationally
ultimately
Don’t use a fancy expression where a plain one would do:
utilize → use
initiate → start
in light of the fact that → because
with reference to → about
at this point in time → now
1. Watch for forms of the verb “to be”
The verb “to be” in all its various forms—“I am,” “you are,” “she or he is,” “they are,” “we have been”—occurs more frequently than any other verb in English. It’s a perfectly fine verb, but relying on it too much can make your sentences longer than they need to be. We’ll look at two ways that “to be” can creep into your writing and make it loose and meandering: the passive voice and “there is” forms.
THE PASSIVE VOICE
Forms of the verb “to be” can signal the presence of the passive voice in your sentence. You’ve probably heard of the passive voice, but you might not be entirely sure what this sentence structure is. It’s called passive because the subject of the sentence is receiving the action of the sentence. Its opposite is the active voice, where the subject of the sentence is doing the action of the sentence. The passive voice is formed using the past participle of a verb (often ending in “-ed”) and a form of the verb “to be.” Because the subject of the sentence isn’t doing the action, it’s often necessary to add a phrase beginning with “by” to indicate who did it.
Let’s look at some examples.
Passive voice: The intruder was arrested by the security guard.
Active voice: The security guard arrested the intruder.
In the passive voice version, the subject of the sentence, “the intruder,” is being acted upon. In the active version, the subject of the sentence, “security guard,” is performing the action.
Passive voice: Gender and annual income were cited by the research as the major drivers of purchase decisions.
Active voice: The research cited gender and annual income as the major drivers of purchase decisions.
As you can see, the “action” of a verb isn’t always physical action—it’s the “doing” part of the sentence. In the example above, “the research” is doing the action, which is citing.
Passive: The beginning of the recession was signaled by a sharp dip in stock prices.
Active: A sharp dip in stock prices signaled the beginning of the recession.
The action in this example is signaling, and it’s the dip in stock prices that’s doing it.
In all these examples, you can see that the passive version is longer than the active version. Usually it’s a difference of just a few words, but if you make a habit of relying on the passive voice and string together a whole paragraph of passive constructions, you can end up with a lot of verbiage you don’t need.
Sometimes the actor in a passive sentence is omitted altogether:
Bus and subway fares were raised. [By whom? Surely not by the MTA?]
Mistakes were made in dealing with the crisis.
It was determined that the proper procedure had been followed.
Looking at examples like these, you can see how using the passive voice might be a handy way to avoid taking responsibility, and some writers use it for exactly that reason.
It’s important to point out that passive constructions aren’t incorrect. In fact, sometimes they’re exactly what you need. You might use a passive construction when you don’t know who did the action:
The alarm was tripped at 4:30 this morning.
The fence was blown down for a third time.
And sometimes you genuinely want to emphasize the object of the action, rather than the actor:
Seating arrangements at the event caused some controversy. Corporate representatives sat at the lower tables. The main table was occupied by the mayor and his special guests.
The last sentence in this short passage is in the passive voice, but it’s a good choice. It’s sensible to make “the main table” the subject of the sentence: the real issue is the seating arrangements, rather than the mayor and his pals.
Although the passive voice is grammatically correct and sometimes preferable, you’re usually better off favoring the active voice in business writing. Many business writers fall into the habit of depending on the passive voice because they see other writers doing it. The sound gets into their heads as the proper sound of business and professional writing, and they simply replicate what they hear. However, active constructions have advantages over passive ones: they’re shorter, they’re more direct, they’re easier to read, and they’re more engaging. They sound more personal—that impersonal, businessy, “official” tone isn’t always what you want—and they create a sense of agency in the sentence: there’s a person (or a thing sometimes) who’s taking action.
As with any other style choice, your use of the passive or active voice should be your decision rather than something you fall into because you don’t know how to control it. Learning to convert passive constructions into active ones, and vice versa, gives you more control over your own writing.
So how do you change a passive construction into an active one? Follow these three steps:
1.Diagnose the passive voice by looking for forms of the verb “to be,” like “is,” “are,” “has been,” “have been,” and so on, plus the past participle of the verb (usually ending in “-ed”). Passive sentences will sometimes contain phrases beginning with “by” to indicate who or what is doing the action.
2.Ask yourself who or what is doing the acting in the sentence, and who or what is receiving the action.
3.Flip the sentence so the actor is the subject.
Let’s try an example:
The models are used by the teams to project revenue.
1.Form of the verb “to be” followed by a past participle? Yes, “are used.”
2.Who or what is doing the acting in the sentence? It’s the teams.
3.Flip the sentence so that the actor is the subject:
The teams use the models to project revenue.
You can see that the revision isn’t just shorter, it’s also clearer and more direct.
Here are a few samples for you to practice on. (Solutions are at the bottom of the next page.)
A.Stress testing is conducted by banks to ensure adequate capital levels.
B.The guidelines were rewritten by legal counsel to prevent future breaches.
C.Personas are used by marketers to help them understand who their target customers are.
D.The faulty monitor was replaced.
(Notice that in the last sentence, the person doing the replacing doesn’t even appear. In your revision, you get to make up who did it.)
“THERE IS,” “THERE ARE,” “IT IS”
Forms of the verb “to be” can also signal the presence of filler phrases like “there is,” “there are,” and “it is.” These are not passive constructions, and they’re not incorrect. However, they don’t add meaning, they can create an impersonal and distant feel, and they waste space. Once you learn to spot them, you can tighten up your writing considerably.
Original: There is a large group of potential customers that can be reached by our affiliate marketing program.
Revised: Our affiliate marketing program can reach a large group of potential customers.
Original: There are three questions for you to keep in mind.
Revised: You should keep three questions in mind.
Original: It is under these conditions that the risk is highest.
Revised: The risk is highest under these conditions.
Used occasionally, “there is” and “it is” constructions can help you vary your style and add interest to your writing. As a steady diet, though, they can slow things down and make your writing feel impersonal. Be careful they don’t become a habit.
Becoming aware of how you use—or overuse—the verb “to be” can help you tighten and strengthen your writing. Of course, the verb “to be” has plenty of legitimate uses. But when you rely on it too much, your writing can become bloated. Paying attention to your “to be” habits can help you in your quest to make your writing more concise.
2. Watch for prepositional phrases
A preposition is a part of speech defined as “a word or group of words that is used with a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to show direction, location, or time, or to introduce an object.”† That’s a pretty vague definition, and it isn’t terrifically helpful on its own. But remembering the definition of prepositions is not as important as your ability to spot them and understand what they do.
Prepositions are those words like “in,” “on,” “of,” “into,” “by,” “under,” “with,” “around,” “about,” and “between” that serve as connectors in a sentence. You’ll find a long list of common prepositions in Appendix B. They introduce prepositional phrases. A prepositional phrase begins with a preposition and has a noun or a pronoun as the object of the preposition. Like so:
about the customer
in the office
on the phone
by my authority
under these circumstances
of the organization
Like the passive voice, prepositional phrases are perfectly correct grammatical forms. It would be hard to write in English without using them. The problem comes when they’re overused. When writers try to sound “official,” they often fall into the trap of piling up prepositional phrases one after the other. Policy statements and anything else trying to sound legal often feature lots of prepositional phrases strung together. Learning to identify prepositions and the phrases that follow them is an important skill in making your writing more concise, so be on the lookout for phrases beginning with “of,” “by,” “in,” “for,” “about,” “with,” “through,” and other prepositions.
Let’s look at an example:
Participation in client negotiations with suppliers is prohibited by company policy unless (in very rare circumstances) there is advance consent of a leader of the gyro division in the client’s geography as well as an industry leader for the supplier’s industry.
Whoa. Most people can recognize this kind of writing as bad. It’s a little harder to identify exactly what’s wrong (it’s prepositional phrases and forms of the verb “to be”) and understand how to fix it. Let’s take this sentence apart. The prepositional phrases are in italics, and the “to be” forms are in bold:
Participation
in client negotiations
with suppliers
is prohibited
by company policy, unless
(in very rare circumstances) there is advance consent
of a leader
of the gyro division
in the client’s geography as well as an industry leader
for the supplier’s industry.
That’s a lot of prepositional phrases all strung together. How do we fix it? The first step is to figure out what the message is and say it in plain English.
Here’s a colloquial “translation” of the passage:
You can’t participate in client negotiations with suppliers unless a leader in the gyro division and a leader in the supplier’s industry say it’s okay.
That version is probably too informal to use, but doing this kind of commonsense check can help you sort out what’s really going on in a sentence burdened with too many prepositional phrases. With only minor revisions, you can turn this version into something you can use:
You may not participate in client negotiations with suppliers unless a leader in the gyro division and a leader in the supplier’s industry consent.
Although the prepositional phrases were the main culprit in the sentence, we also cleaned up a couple of forms of the verb “to be.” “Participation . . . is prohibited” became “you may not participate,” and “unless . . . there is advance consent” became “unless a leader . . . and a leader . . . consent.” (You’ll often find loose forms of the verb “to be” in sentences that have strings of prepositional phrases.)
So what’s the remedy? Here are three techniques you can use to fix sentences that are overburdened with prepositional phrases:
1.Look for the action in the sentence or clause: What is the action, and who’s doing it?
Our original sentence read: “unless there is advance consent of a leader of the gyro division.” What’s the action there, and who’s doing that action? The action is “consent,” and the person giving consent is a leader. So we can revise to “unless a leader of the gyro division consents.”
2.Replace a prepositional phrase with an adjective:
the permission of the client → the client’s permission
members of the committee → committee members
of a high quality → high-quality
3.Replace a prepositional phrase with an adverb:
in very rare circumstances → rarely
in an efficient manner → efficiently
with clarity → clearly
Once you become attuned to spotting prepositions and prepositional phrases, you’ll see them everywhere. Most of them are probably fine. But when you start accumulating a lot of them, you usually end up with unnecessary length. Trimming prepositional phrases can help you make your writing more concise and efficient.
3. Watch for nominalizations
What the heck is “nominalization”? It’s taking a verb or adjective, turning it into a noun, and then adding more words to the sentence or phrase to make it mean what it meant in the first place.
Maybe an example would help. Look at the phrases below and see if you can recognize what’s going on here:
Reach an agreement = agree
Make a decision = decide
Achieve a balance = balance
Suffer a loss = lose
Have a response = respond
Conduct an investigation = investigate
Have applicability = apply
Engage in a search = search
The words on the right-hand side of the equal signs are all perfectly good verbs that someone felt the need to nominalize—that is, to turn into a noun. Then, because the verb had become a noun, the writer needed an additional verb to do the work needed in the sentence. So because “search” somehow wasn’t good enough, someone changed it to “conduct a search,” adding words but not meaning.
Nominalization isn’t grammatically incorrect, but it’s a very common bad habit in business writing. It’s usually done to create writing that sounds official and objective. It adds length without contributing additional meaning.
You’ll often see nominalization in sentences that feature prepositional phrases and the passive voice. They’re all part of the common impulse in business writing to make sentences longer so that they’ll sound more authoritative. The cure for nominalization is to convert these phrases back to the original verb or adjective they came from.
Instead of
Heavy traffic on Monday morning caused the network to experience slowness.
Try
Heavy traffic on Monday morning slowed the network down.
(“Experience slowness” is a nominalization of the verb “slow.”)
Instead of
Engaging in regular discussion about expectations can help enhance the performance of employees.
Try
Discussing expectations regularly can help employees perform better.
(“Engaging in discussion” is a nominalization of the verb “discuss”; “enhance the performance of” is a nominalization of “performing better.”)
Most writers aren’t even aware that they’re using nominalizations; they’re just trying to make their writing sound more “businesslike.” Once you become aware of the pattern, it’s easy to recognize it and to say what you mean in a clearer and more straightforward way.
4. Watch for padding
We’ve looked at how relying on the verb “to be” can make a sentence long and sloppy. We’ve looked at how prepositional phrases and nominalizations can make sentences unnecessarily long. Now let’s look at padding—that is, using more words than you need.
There are lots of ways to pad a sentence. Two of the most common are using redundancies and relying on filler words and phrases that don’t add meaning.
Redundancy in writing is unnecessary repetition. Here are some common redundancies that might look familiar to you:
10 a.m. in the morning (“a.m.” means “in the morning”)
Absolutely essential (if something is essential, it’s essential; something can’t be “sort of essential”)
Advance warning (all warnings occur in advance)
Basic fundamentals (fundamentals are basic)
Current trend (unless you’re writing about a historical trend)
Final conclusion (a conclusion is final)
Follow after (“follow” is enough)
Merge together (“merge” implies “together”)
Group together (“grouping” is putting things together)
Future plans (all plans are for the future; you can’t plan for the past)
Postpone till later (“postpone” means reschedule for later)
Still remains (“remains” implies “still”)
Unintentional mistake (if it was a mistake, it was not intentional)
Some writers use redundancies as rhetorical devices, for emphasis.
Sales and marketing would like us to increase production to meet the spike in demand. But in actual fact, we cannot increase production that quickly, so we need to find a way to engage the market realistically given our current limited capacity.
In this example, “actual fact” is a redundancy (all facts are actual facts), but the writer has used this expression to emphasize his point that sales and marketing are asking for something that’s not realistic.
Most of the time, though, writers use redundancies unconsciously. It’s a bad habit you have to break.
An occasional redundancy isn’t such a big deal, unless you’re a real stickler. The problem comes when this kind of writing expands and becomes ingrained. This habit feeds into the tendency of some business writers to write unnecessarily long and needlessly complex sentences, trying to sound professional and authoritative. Consider a sentence like this:
Everybody must share a clear common understanding of the company’s key risks and a clear line of sight into the overall general level of exposure to those risks.
You can see there’s repetition in the sentence (“clear”), but there’s also significant redundancy. When “everybody” has an understanding, it’s already “shared.” If it’s a common understanding, then everybody has it. So the beginning of a revised version of this sentence might go something like this:
Everybody must share an understanding of the company’s key risks . . .
What about “a clear line of sight”? Doesn’t that just mean “understand”? And what’s the difference between “overall” and “general”? Aren’t they the same?
So how about this version instead:
Everybody must share an understanding of the company’s key risks and its level of exposure to those risks.
You could even take it this far, if you wanted to trim more:
Everybody must understand the company’s key risks and its level of exposure to them.
Let’s look at another example:
The projected cost for the renovation is estimated at approximately $11 million.
“Projected,” “is estimated,” and “approximately” all convey the same idea. One alternative version of this sentence:
The projected cost for the renovation is $11 million.
Once you become attuned to redundancy in writing, you’ll begin to see it everywhere, and you’ll get better at stopping yourself from writing redundant prose. Your writing will be more concise and clearer, with a more natural voice.
Another problem that can make your writing bloated is the habit of using filler words and phrases that don’t add meaning. Consider these overused words and phrases:
Actually
A number of
Apparently
At the end of the day
A variety of
Basically
Completely
Currently
Entire
Honestly
I just wanted to
In many cases
In many ways
Literally
Meaningful
Significant
Totally
Very
Whole
With reference to
Of course, all these terms have meanings, and when they’re used precisely they contribute to the meaning of the sentence. The trouble is that they’re often dropped thoughtlessly into sentences where they contribute no meaning at all.
In many ways, the cost estimate is higher than expected.
In how many ways was the estimate higher than expected? (How many ways could an estimate be higher than expected?) If there’s no answer to this question, the phrase is probably serving no purpose except to take up space.
With reference to the proposed expansion, I really don’t support this idea.
This sentence is awkward; getting rid of the filler can help:
I don’t support the idea of expansion.
Here’s another example:
Hi all,
I just wanted to check in about the whole video production process. I totally agree with Sam that it’s very important to involve the full team at the kickoff meeting.
Felix
Felix’s entire first sentence feels like padding. His real message is in fact very brief:
Hi all,
I agree with Sam that the whole team should be involved in the video kickoff meeting.
Thanks,
Felix
Sometimes people pad their writing for social reasons—they want to sound friendly or they don’t want to sound abrupt. Consider if there are other ways to create a friendly tone in your communication, rather than padding your writing with meaningless phrases. In the second example above, the “Thanks” added to Felix’s brief message creates goodwill with his readers. It might take a minute or two of thought, but you can be concise and polite at the same time.
Work with Drafts
It’s likely that every English teacher you ever had told you to work through multiple drafts when you write. Maybe you did writing assignments in high school or college that included writing a rough draft, getting feedback from the instructor, and then rewriting the draft at least once. If you’re like most people, when you started writing at work you realized you didn’t have a lot of time to get your writing done, so the idea of working with drafts seems like an impossible luxury.
While you might not have as much time as you’d like to polish your writing, developing a sensible approach to working with drafts can improve your writing significantly and can save you time in the long run.
The reason working with drafts leads to better writing is that it allows for time between iterations. During this time, you develop a different perspective on what you’ve written, even if you’re continuing to think about it (or perhaps because you’re not continuing to think about it). That different perspective helps you catch errors, notice gaps in content, cut out extraneous information, and recognize that you might have said something insensitive or politically unwise. Getting that little bit of distance can help you take a more objective eye to your own writing.
So the trick is to build in some time between iterations, even during your busy workday. You probably won’t have a week to let your first draft rest, but can you find a day between drafts? If not a day, how about a few hours? Some business writers do all their important writing for the day first thing in the morning, when they feel fresh, and then return to their drafts near the end of the day. The time that’s passed during the workday lets them revisit and revise what they wrote in the morning.
If this kind of system won’t work for you, do whatever you can to take a break after you write your first draft. For instance, try writing out a quick draft before you have to go into a meeting, and then checking it before you need to send it out. Try grabbing a cup of coffee between your first and second drafts. Do whatever you can within the confines of your busy day to help yourself get some distance on your early drafts and enable you to make improvements in later ones.
It can be difficult to find additional time in the day, but devising a system that allows you to work with drafts will save you time in the long run—your communications will be clearer and more complete, and you’ll spend less time following up to clarify.
Writing Is Rewriting
Steve Strauss
Would you ever expect to go to the theater to watch a movie and see the director’s very first cut or the raw footage of the film? Of course not. When you read a book, are you getting the author’s unedited first take of the manuscript? Again, no. Why is that? Because we know that when someone has an important idea to convey—whether it is a director or an author or whoever—they will take the time to do it right and give us their best effort.
The same should be true for you and your business writing. Writing is rewriting (or it should be). It doesn’t matter whether you are writing a blog, a letter, a proposal, or an e-mail. You owe it to your reader—and, more importantly, to yourself—to take the time and have it say what you really mean. And that requires some editing, plain and simple.
Very few of us can put down on paper (or screen!) exactly what we want to say the very first time we think it. Either the idea will be unformed, or it won’t come out exactly as intended, or there will be typos. Whatever the case, it is vital, if you want your writing and ideas to be both understood and taken seriously, that you take a little extra time, give the item a little extra effort, and have it say precisely what you mean.
Ask yourself this question: What would you think of a job applicant whose cover letter got your address wrong, or contained typos, or used “i” instead of “I”? You would likely think that the person is lazy, sloppy, or uneducated—or all three. Yet that is the very risk you take when you don’t edit, review, and rewrite your writing. Doing so will not only ensure that you avoid mistakes that can be damaging to your business, brand, or career but will also mean that the recipient will truly understand what it is you are trying to say.
That will happen, however, only if you live by the mantra “Writing is rewriting.”
(And, by the way, I edited this sidebar eight times.)
Steve Strauss is a best-selling author and the senior USA Today small business columnist. He runs the website TheSelfEmployed.com.