Same Ideas, Half the Words

One of the biggest rules of the internet is to keep things succinct and get to the point as soon as possible. So if you’re looking to write professionally, you need to keep things short. Here’s how it’s done. 

How Short Are We Talking About?

The biggest reason you’d like to keep things short and sweet is to make sure as many people read what you wrote. Your writing could be beautiful, expressive, and aesthetic, but it’s all for nothing if no one has time to read it. In essence, you’re making a deal with the reader - “Give me your time, and I won’t waste it”. 

That’s why even though a blog has room for more words, it’s important to get the point across fast and tell people what they are going to get from it. A tweet could technically be longer than 280 characters if you have a blue check-mark, but asking the reader for that extra click on “read more” means you’re asking more of their time and attention. Could you do without? Could your post be summarized in one sentence? One image? One meme? If so, there’s no advantage to verbosity. 

Effective writing means understanding the platform you’re on. Give yourself an upper limit - for example, avoiding the “see more” line on X, or not creating the “wall of text” effect on Facebook. If you are writing long-form, try to think practically and put yourself in the shoes of the reader. Come up with the fastest and shortest way to convince them to spend time reading your words.

Shorter, not Faster

A common quote, attributed to Mark Twain says “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Counterintuitively, keeping things short and succinct can be quite time-consuming. So the first step is to accept that good copy takes time. You’ll need to allow yourself the opportunity to edit down and cut as much as possible, while still hitting your messages. 

Recently, I’ve been working with a client on a social media campaign. We went back and forth on information, and I started working on the first draft. Then, for the second draft, I did my best to cut the word count by half. This was both excruciating and time-consuming, but it was very necessary. The end result was several times better than the original, but it was only possible because we afforded the time to keep things short. Make sure you dedicate enough time to trim down your words for the better. Otherwise, you might find yourself with hard-to-understand texts as a result of a rushed editing process. 

Cultural Fluency

You know those articles that pop up every once in a while, promising confused parents to uncover the meaning of their children’s newly-formed slang? They happen because cultures change and tend to evolve their own internal language. That doesn’t mean you need to know what ‘skibidi' or 'gyatt' mean, but it does mean that you need to be able to speak the language of your audience, not just in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but also the wider culture. 

There are plenty of advantages to cultural fluency when writing, but for our purposes, we’ll focus on a big one: When you are culturally fluent, you get to make shortcuts. You can evoke emotions with a subtle reference. You can carry entire messages through punctuation. And all of that means you’re writing less without losing out on the effectiveness of your messaging.

There’s a reason why memes are popular, and it’s not to confuse the previous generation. It’s because they represent a connection through a shared language that, if you can tap into it, can carry your message across with only a few words. And all industries have this type of inner culture—even “serious” ones like Insurance or Law. 

It’s Not the Word Count, It’s the Impact

If I were to boil down the most crucial lesson from this post, it would be this: Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. They are bombarded with communication all day, every day. Texts, photos, memes, videos - it never ends. But of course, you’re different. What you have to tell them is important. So make sure you tell it as clearly and quickly as possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a tooltip in an app or a blog post, respect your reader’s time. That’s the best way to ensure your wording is effective. 

And with that, we’ll leave off (we are trying to keep things short, after all). The next time you write, ask yourself - can this be shorter?

Good luck.