Three tips to keep your B2B writing brief

“The more words I use to describe this,” you might mutter, as you try to explain what makes your strategic software solution different to someone else’s strategic software solution, “the more likely some of them will hit the mark.”

Nope. The more unnecessary words the reader has to digest, the more likely they’ll drift off into musings about whether Findus still make crispy pancakes* or if Dick Van Dyke is alive**.

Here are three ways to tighten up your writing:

1. Read it out loud. Where you find yourself stumbling or thinking about crispy pancakes, start editing.

2. Challenge yourself to cut the word count by 20%. See what you can remove without losing the sense of each sentence.

3. Use the Find function to seek out words and phrases that could be deleted without impacting the meaning. For starters, try: really, quite, just, a bit, slightly, simply and very.

* They’re BirdsEye Crispy Pancakes nowadays.
** Wikipedia says yes.