I bet you know someone.
Perhaps the girl next door.
Whenever you meet her she keeps rambling on so much you can hardly follow her story.
And then there’s the guy, who’s always trying to win a game of bullshit bingo. How much nonsense can you listen to?
Of course, you are a different kind of communicator.
You focus on your listener, or reader.
You try hard to be concise.
You edit your content.
You polish each word.
But could it be that a dash of wordiness sneaks into your blog post? Could your web copy suffer from a bout of verbosity?
It’s easily done.
The web is full of words without meaning. Messages buried under wordy sludge. Content so dense that it turns readers away in disgust.
How do you know whether your messages come across loud and clear? How do you know whether wordiness might be sabotaging your communication?
Let’s have a look at the 4 types of wordiness.
Avoid each type of wordiness, and your sentences become concise and clear, your message becomes stronger. And more people will listen and follow your advice.
Sound good?
Wordiness type #1: Sentence bloat
Imagine sitting down for a good meal.
With a friend you haven’t seen for a while.
The food is delicious but you hardly taste it. Because the talking is even better. You’re mindlessly gobbling up your food, and before you know it you’ve eaten too much.
When you’re writing, you might get in a flow. You write word after word. Sentence after sentence. Paragraph after paragraph.
You feel excited. But your readers are less happy.
You’ve stuffed your sentences full of words, making them difficult to digest. You’re rambling on without realizing it. Your long sentences are wearing your readers down.
This type of wordiness is easy to cure:
- Write your first draft and edit it as usual.
- For this exercise, add an extra white line after each sentence, so that each sentence stands on its own.
- Look for your longest sentences and chop them in two, and cut unnecessary words.
- Read each sentence aloud, and ask yourself: Does it add meaning? If it doesn’t, scrap it. If it adds meaning, can you find a way to shorten it?
Combat wordiness. Make each sentence, and each word count.
Wordiness type #2: Indulgence in complex words
I recently traveled around Andalucía for a few days.
The best food I tasted was usually simple.
Espeto de sardinas–barbecued sardines. Gambas al ajillo–prawns fried with garlic and chilies. Choco a la plancha–grilled squid, seasoned with only salt and garlic plus a squeeze of lemon juice. That’s all.
When we write, we often complicate our language by using too many spices or fancy cooking methods.
To keep your language fresh and simple:
- Imagine phoning your ideal reader. Or perhaps you’d like to picture yourself meeting in a tapas bar.
- Read your content aloud. Does your ideal reader laugh at your inflated language? Does she shake her head because you sound like a windbag? Or does she appreciate your words? Does she nod along because she gets what you’re talking about?
- If she slams down the phone or laughs at you, rephrase and simplify your language. Pay attention to words that sound posh, exaggerated, or foreign.
Don’t spoil your message with fancy words. Keep it fresh and tasty. (tweet this)
Wordiness type #3: Paragraph density
Picture a plate of mashed potatoes piled as high as possible.
It doesn’t look appetizing, does it?
Paragraph density has the same problem. No matter how good your sentences, no matter how valuable your ideas, your web visitors don’t want to start reading. Because your blog design turns them off.
This type of wordiness is the easiest to solve:
- Before you hit publish, check what your blog post looks like on screen
- Eliminate text blocks that are longer than 6 lines
- Introduce bullet points, subheadings, and one-sentence paragraphs to add more white space. See how I’ve done that in this blog post?
Your blog post should look like nouvelle cuisine—lots of white space, and bite-sized content that keeps people snacking.
Wordiness type #4: Lack of clarity
When you start cooking, you have a recipe in mind.
You know how you want to delight and impress your dinner guests.
When you write content—whether it’s a blog post or a sales page—you also need to decide how you want to please your readers. Can you describe your message in one sentence?
Sometimes I can’t communicate a message because I haven’t discovered its essence yet. And when I don’t know the essence, how can I communicate it well?
You can find the essence of your writing in several ways:
- Write to bring clarity
When your idea is fuzzy, freewriting can bring clarity. Write as fast as possible to uncover unexpected ideas. Then reverse-outline your post. What are key thoughts in your writing? And how can you create a logical flow? What’s relevant and what’s irrelevant? You can usually throw away the first few paragraphs as you were just warming up.
- Get away from your computer
Take a sheet of paper and try to sketch out or scribble down your ideas. Getting away from your computer often unlocks creativity, and it can help you prioritize your messages.
- Read more
Do you really understand what you’re writing about? Can you dig deeper by reading more? I don’t mean reading a few blog posts. I’m talking about reading one or two books. For my first Copyblogger guest post, for instance, I read 6 books before I started writing the post.
- Lift the curse of knowledge
Sometimes we know our subject too well. We focus on details without communicating the bigger picture. We assume readers understand concepts, but they don’t. We use phrases that baffle beginners. This is when we suffer from the curse of knowledge–we lose our ability to explain our ideas to beginners.
The only way to defeat the curse of knowledge, is by listening to your readers. Encourage them to ask questions. Get on the phone to hear their thoughts. Learn what they’re struggling with, and pay attention to the phrases they use.
When you’re editing your content, step in the shoes of your reader. Does he understand your key message? Or are you distracting him with details that don’t matter?
Each piece of content should communicate one simple idea. Scrap every word that distracts. (tweet this)
The truth about wordiness
Being concise is hard work.
Writing in simple words is more difficult than it seems.
Chop funny asides when they’re irrelevant. Kill your darling sentences when they’re distracting. Slaughter your favorite words when your reader doesn’t know them.
Above all, don’t write to show off your intelligence, your vocabulary, or your knowledge.
Write to delight and please your reader.
Be good.
PS Special thanks to Val Manchuk who gave me the idea for this post.
Further reading on wordiness:
How to sculpt concise sentences
How to write with clarity
How to eliminate gobbledygook
Very nice. I especially like the 6 line paragraph rule!
I like simple rules 🙂
Hello Henneke,
I really liked this article, can’t wait to put it into practice. I find this advice extremely useful, for many fields (mine for example which is architecture). I really agree with your last statement:
“Don’t write to show off your intelligence, your vocabulary, or your knowledge.”
this is one of the reasons why I really like your blog 🙂
Glad to hear you enjoyed your trip to Spain!
Kind regards, Virginia
Yes, it was a good trip. Good to be away from my computer for a while – it’s always re-energizing. 🙂
Thank you for stopping by again, Virginia!
So many great points!
You’re absolutely right about the importance of the layout. A blog post heavy with long blocks of text looks off-putting. (However well crafted the words may be.)
And I really like the food metaphor you used throughout the post 🙂
Ha yes, I love food metaphors 🙂
And isn’t it amazing how many writers ruin their content with tiny fonts and dense blocks of text?
Wow. This is can be excruciating (painful) when trying to combine (mix?) it with every other tip and suggestion (idea) out there. I love writing that uses stories and allusions (oops, I meant, uh…let me think…umm…references?…no…wow…quotes?), and thought we should use them, too, but perhaps this shift to “snacking” instead of having real meals is popular and we should accommodate it. (Oh, sorry, that word was big, wasn’t it! Umm…maybe we should give in to it, right?) She sighs.
Once upon a time, we simplified (made our writing more direct [to the point] and readable [easy to read] by writing as we speak. That was the rule. Since then, several writing teachers have noticed some of us actually (really) use 3- and 4-syllable (part) words all the time, even when we converse (speak) with our children. On purpose. And we like it.
This probably is the most difficult (hard) lesson for me. Can you tell? 😉
Of course, I’ve failed on “chop funny asides when they’re irreverent”. Ha.
Yes, I can tell. 🙂
But we don’t have to eliminate (scrap) all multi-syllable (long) words.
Sometimes a long word is more precise-it conveys our idea better.
The Zen of when
to stop the flow
when reader and writer
both exclaim Oh!
Thanks.
C A Hall
Short and sweet.
I love you poems, Carol.
Great post Henneke! And thank you for linking back to my blog!
Val
You’re welcome, Val. Thanks again for the idea – together we can beat verbosity 🙂
I always feel like I’ve gotten a little shot of Adreneline when I read your blogs. They read fast and are super-charged with information. My mind goes, “I can do that!”
Yes, you can do it – of course!
I work hard to combat wordiness, helping you to read faster. It works 🙂
Thank you for stopping by again, Teri.
Fantastic post Henneke. Giving the food metaphors really brought it home – as well as the way you laid out this post too. Thanks so much for the hints. All v. valuable.
Good to see you again! Glad you find the post useful 🙂
Umm, after stripping out all of the gumpf there might not be much left 😉
I don’t believe you! 😉
PS Nice word – gumpf 🙂
Briefly thorough, as usual.
Thank you, Melinda. 🙂
Great post.
This is the one thing I struggle the hardest with.
I once wrote a PhD thesis knowing full well that a) nobody is going to read it from beginning to end and b) if anyone IS interested in any part, they will battle through the crap (as I have done on many occasions) to get to the bottom of the answer.
Writing a blog post or email sequence is the exact opposite.
It is so much harder than anything have ever done before. Thank you very much for the tips. I will definitely try them out.
When a text is easy to read, we often think a writer quickly wrote the words down. But the truth is, the simplest texts are often the hardest to write. You have to edit, edit, edit.
Asking feedback from a friend who’s not afraid to be honest can help, too. Ask them which parts they skipped (seriously consider scrapping these parts) and where they stumbled or had to re-read a sentence or paragraph (this is where you have to rewrite to simplify).
Glad to see you’re still around, Kerstin 🙂
Of course I’m still around. It’s so much great advice.
You are absolutely right, making anything look easy requires a lot of work. Just think gymnastics or ballet. 🙂
Yep, that’s a great comparison 🙂
I just LOVE the way you write. You have made me very aware of long sentences full of unnecessary words. You are so right and it is so refreshing.
I liked the bit about the girl next door and rambling on. It’s so true that you actually can’t follow the story and how it applies to blog posts too.
Thank you for such amazing content.
Yes, that’s one of my favorite techniques – using a “real life” example to illustrate a more abstract idea. 🙂
Somehow we find it easier to grasp ideas about face-to-face conversations rather than writing techniques. Real conversations are easier to visualize, I guess.
Thank you for stopping by, Bev. I appreciate it 🙂
I think I know someone like “the girl next door” who rambles!
Good post. Writing tips that are useful. And I loved your examples.
Glad you found the post useful, Adrienne. Thank you for stopping by. I’ve not seen you before?
No you have not. This is the first time I added a comment.
A warm welcome to you 🙂
Hi, Henneke!
I’ve been reading you for a while (even referencing you in my own writing a couple times), but until now I’ve yet to comment on your wonderful blog.
I’m remedying this right now and it’s long overdue! 🙂
This is an absolutely fantastic post, Henneke. Wordiness type #1 is a trap I fall into if I’m not careful. When I edit my posts before publishing, I often delete numerous sentences. They just don’t add any value. Oftentimes I can’t even remember writing them in the first place! I guess I was just on a roll. 🙂
“Filler words” are another type #1 problem I see a lot when reading blogs. Words like “that,” “very,” “just” and “really” can bloat a sentence without adding any tangible value. The word “that” is especially guilty of this. (I just wrote about “that” today, in fact!)
Keep up the great work.
– Kevin
Hi Kevin, Nice to see you here. Thank you for stopping by. 🙂
Wordiness type #1 is probably the most common trap we set for ourselves. Aiming to cut about 30% of the words from a first draft is not unreasonable.
And you’re absolutely right about filler words. Words like “just” and “that” keep sneaking into my first drafts and I have to keep stomping them out. It’s a continuous battle.
Hi again, Henneke!
Agreed. Whenever I write a draft in the 2,500 to 3,000 word range, I almost always end up in the 1,750 to 2,500 range after edits!
I’m not sure if this means I’m really bad at rambling when I write, or if I’m very good at editing. 🙂
I’m sure it means you’re an excellent editor 🙂
I think it’s a good idea to have an editor, who can help us with those problems, would you agree?
On a different note, I really like your illustrations! I think all bloggers should illustrate their blogs instead of posting creative common images.
Yes, having a good editor can help a lot. It’s probably also a lot quicker as it takes more time to spot your own wordiness. Sometimes we’re too precious with the sentences we’ve composed, and it’s easier for someone else to be ruthless.
Glad you like the illustrations. I’m learning about shadows and shading – which is so interesting. I’m looking with different eyes at the world around me. 🙂
Thank you for stopping by, Lucy. Always good to see you.
I’m not a writer yet.
But I practice these tips in my business emails.
They take a little longer to write…..but get great results.
Yes, cutting wordiness from business emails is critical, too. Too often people dash off emails that haven’t been properly edited.
And for me, everyone who makes an effort to write content – whether it’s emails, blog posts, or books – is a writer.
Thank you for stopping by, Charlie.
Great article – I teach public speaking, presentations, etc. All these principles apply.
Yep, you’re right – quite often the same principles apply to blogging and public speaking. Learning how to blog has certainly made me a better public speaker 🙂
Thank you for stopping by, Rich.
Hi Henneke,
Am a bit (what’s 2 years amongst friends?) to this party and still I have a question. Could you share a few of the 6 books you read to prep for your first Copyblogger post?
Thanks so much,
Your fan, Cynthia
The party is always open for friends 🙂
I’m not 100% sure anymore about the 6 books – it was a long time ago, but I’m sure they included Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath (one of my favorite books); Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman, and Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples (I’d also recommend those three), but the last two I’m not sure. Perhaps one of Dan Kennedy’s books or perhaps Andy Maslen. I would also recommend Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, but I might have read that a little later.
Happy writing, Cynthia!