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Not Expecting Readers to Sacrifice Their Time

Many customers and clients are reluctant to sacrifice significant time on long sentences in Web copy. Here’s a technique to help readers follow your thoughts more quickly. The following sentence is correctly punctuated, but slightly hard to follow at 41 words long: And despite the rebuff by Mr

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

Shorter Sentences and Faster Downloads

25 words makes a good maximum length for most business sentences. So what do you do when a sentence starts mushrooming beyond that comfortable target length? Start by imagining you’d written this 33-word sentence about Adobe’s cloud-computing software: Larger businesses, particularly over the past decade, have become used to subscribing to software rather than buying it — using Salesforce.com for managing customer relationships, for example, or Box

Shorter Sentences — Cookbook Style

Cookbooks can teach business writers a thing or two about presenting ideas clearly. Take a look at this slightly revised, 38-word sentence about iPad cooking apps. It’s about twice the length it should be for comfortable reading: Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy['s] book, The Geometry of Pasta, illustrated entirely in crisp black and white, with all pasta shapes drawn true to size, met Ms

Groupon’s IPO and a Tip for Grouping Your Ideas Clearly

The longer a sentence gets, the more difficult it is to group its ideas clearly. But even average-length sentences can be unnecessarily tangled, as in this example: As investors clamored for shares, Groupon, at the end of the day, priced its initial public offering at $20, above the expected range of $16 to $18. That sentence is 27 words long — a good length in business prose
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