A look into terse, concise writing & why it is important for today’s content creators.
WHY SHOULD I BOTHER BEING SUCCINCT:
“There is need of brevity, that the thought may run on.”
Horace
Writing succinctly is no easy task.
See what I did there? — #Brief —
In all seriousness, writing with brevity in mind is challenging to almost every writer. Even the most terse masters of prose like Ernest Hemingway struggled with it.
Thanks to shrinking attention spans, writing to the point is key to getting visitors to read through your whole message. Producing this kind of content will benefit you by boosting your users’ experience and even further, boosting your SEO score.
In the current age of SEO, creating this kind of succinct, high quality content is ever important to improving organic ranking.
“To be successful in writing, use short sentences.”
Ernest Hemingway
Now the question becomes, how do we boil down our content to the most succinct version possible without taking away from the message?
The answer is unfortunately not so straightforward because while there are some general guidelines, every piece of content is unique (or at least should be for your SEO’s sake).
We’re going to discuss some of the ways you can successfully cut down on excessive language and achieve succinctness bliss.
The first step is knowing your audience.
GET STARTED BY KNOWING YOUR INTENDED AUDIENCE:
Figuring out what type of piece you are writing greatly impacts everything from the way you structure your sentences and paragraphs to the tone and style you use to the eventual length of your piece.
A research paper is much different from a blog post or a marketing email or a social media post and so on. Hence, the audience for each of these different pieces is going to be very different, as will their expectations for the content.
As a good writer, which I am sure you are, you will have a certain tone unique to your content which your readers should come to expect but the type of content should also be considered when crafting a piece.
Differentiating the things which take value in each writing situation will help you in choosing what needs to be cut in the final draft.
For example, a research paper is going to be much more analytical than a social media post. The tone of a research paper is going to be more blunt with less fluff so removing excess adjectives is a must but keeping numbers and analytical data is also a must… With a social media post, the tone will be a lot more conversational and relaxed and you can use more adjectives and less data to not bog down the post.
This is all even before we think about the topic you are writing about which will largely depict the eventual style of your message.
While trying to write succinctly, make sure you don’t sacrifice personality.
“Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can’t quite get off their back. And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.”
Bruce Springsteen
Be yourself when you are writing but make sure you know what your audience is expecting from you going into each piece of content.
I am not going to sit here and say one solution fits all because that is simply not true. I have read some research papers with pizzazz and very serious social media posts, you cannot say I am writing X so my tone and style will be Y. Sometimes very particular factors play into the content you are writing and you can let those factors help you craft your piece.
Every piece is unique!
NEXT, LEARNING WHAT TO CUT DOWN ON:
We have discussed our type of content and understanding our audience so let’s turn to knowing what is worth cutting out of our rough draft.
Long winded sentences are exactly what they sound like and are described as such because at a certain point during which you are reading through them you start to become short of breath and need to take a break so you can…
I hated that too.
I could have just said, “Long winded sentences are challenging to follow and cannot be read in one breath.”
The reason being succinct is so attractive is because it makes every sentence digestible. Deciding what to cut is the biggest challenge.
Verbiage: speech or writing that uses too many words or excessively technical expressions.
Being concise usually starts with removing excessive words, expressions or descriptives. In the first draft, you should feel free to go balls to the wall. Include everything to the fullest extent so you have the entire picture painted in front of you. Exhaust yourself when it comes to first drafts with writing excess and not thinking or worrying about it.
But remember our friend Horace, you are being brief for the sake of increasing the reader’s engagement and activating their imagination.
It is hard to take any specific example because what you are writing will largely influence what needs to be cut.
“You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.”
Ernest Hemingway
There are a few general guidelines I like to keep in mind when thinning out a piece:
- Remove the word “that” from every place possible
- Remove redundant adjectives
- Remove redundant sentences, anything off topic (unless later relevant)
- Look at prepositional phrases and see if necessary
- Look in depth at every long sentence and pick it apart or reword it to be simpler, if this doesn’t work try to convert into multiple sentences
- Be critical and think like a reader
These guidelines for brevity should punch up any piece of content you are creating and can be worked through relatively quickly. Just make sure you don’t rush or overthink it, sometimes the word ‘that’ is needed to make a sentence read better or a redundant sentence is necessary to get a point across.
Rules are meant to be broken from time to time, right?
Now we’ve got some brevity basics, let’s talk next about being succinct in today’s SEO environment.
BECOMING SEO SUCCINCT:
You may be saying, “How do I stay succinct when everyone tells me all the content on my website should be x words long for SEO???”
Well first and foremost, SEO is about a lot more than just the length of the content on your pages and if that is your focus you are in trouble.
Let’s talk about why SEO experts are always recommending specific minimums for content. The main intention for adding more words to a piece is making it easier to load up on keywords without using them disproportionately. In layman’s terms, write more so you can put more of the keywords you want to rank for into your content without them sounding repetitive.
The key to brevity in SEO terms comes down to creating simple, quality content.
Don’t just remove words willy-nilly, feel out whether they are necessary to get the point across. You may rewrite a sentence a dozen or more times before realizing you are in fact just going to scrap it altogether. Other times you will work on cleaning up a sentence for hours only to realize one word here or there makes it work beautifully.
Not everyone will admit it is OK when these missteps happen, but it is so much better than just accepting what is there if you feel a need for change.
ROME WASN’T BUILT IN A DAY FOLKS.
Making the reader take on pointless information is the real loss when not being succinct because it will push your audience away AND hurt your SEO score. That’s a REAL double negative!
It may sound counterintuitive based on the way academic writing works but don’t force your content to be longer than it needs to be. Your audience is no longer a teacher in a classroom with a word/page count requirement anymore.
Write the message you are trying to send and be clear and concise. Your audience will love you for it.
BREVITY IN CONCLUSION:
We all know the power of succinct writing but we may not fully recognize it.
Some of the greatest examples of academic writing and storytelling come from this discipline.
Look at The Sopranos. They finished the story with a cut to black before revealing what happens to the character you have become family with after watching the series. Or how about Hemingway cutting the end of A Farewell to Arms to a sentence when he wrote 47 different endings of different lengths…
“After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
These endings have a way of sticking with the audience well beyond their consumption of it. As a Hemingway fanatic, I have a copy of Farewell with all of the different endings and I have read them all. With 100% certainty, none compare to the beautiful tragedy which concludes the book.
This ending forces the reader to imagine what Frederic Henry’s life will be after his wife and child die during a challenging birth. It sits with you as you contemplate how life could possibly go on for this downtrodden soul, and it is one sentence long. Compared to wondering how Tony’s fate was sealed during his dinner at Holsten’s… Curiosity drives the consumers to keep that content on their mind after the fact.
Brevity serves many different purposes, part being concise and to the point, part making the reader think, part creating wit and many other parts. The point is that brevity does a service for the reader in making the content direct, easier to digest, and engaging.
Don’t be the fool who expands their message to the point of devaluing and derailing it or minimizing it to nothing, be artfully succinct.
“My liege, and madam, to expostulate,
What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
