Of Concision and West Coast Cafes

Concision pays off in business writing. The following 45-word question lists six separate San Francisco cafes; it’s about twice the length most sentences should be in marketing or blog copy:

Did their coffee bar and roastery, called Sightglass (after the window in the roaster for checking on the beans), stand a chance in a city that already had Ritual, Four Barrel, and Blue Bottle, not to mention old-timer Graffeo in North Beach and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s?

It’s easy for your ideas to stretch out and get tangled when you’re writing under a deadline. To detangle a sentence quickly, rearrange it as a bulleted list:

  • Their coffee bar and roastery is called Sightglass.
  • The name is from the roaster window for checking on the beans.
  • Does Sightglass stand a chance in a city crowded with cafes?
  • The city already had Ritual, Four Barrel, and Blue Bottle, not to mention old-timer Graffeo in North Beach and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s.

A list is an extremely clear format for presenting a series of facts that follow an introductory statement. Since there is no introductory, framing idea here, it’s necessary to reassemble these list items in paragraph form.

Here’s one way to do it. These two 17- and 24-word sentences are much easier for a busy reader to sip at than the big-gulp 45-word sentence above:

Their coffee bar and roastery is called Sightglass, after the roaster window for checking on the beans. Did Sightglass stand a chance in a city that already had Ritual, Four Barrel, Blue Bottle, old-timer Graffeo in North Beach, and granddaddy-gone-mainstream Peet’s?

Try using a list when you need to present intricate information concisely and clearly. A list can help you identify your thoughts, contain them in neater punctuation, and hand them to your reader in easy-to-grasp informational servings.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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