How well is your message understood?
Most people tend to ramble on and on when writing a
message. The reader becomes confused and communication
is lost. What you need to do is find the right balance
of words and the right words for the balance.
The Right Balance
Good business writing is concise and to the point.
The shorter your sentences and the shorter your
paragraphs, the more likely your message will be
understood. Studies have shown that as a sentence
or paragraph becomes longer, the comprehension
dramatically starts dropping. Here are some
percentages
illustrating my point:
Sentence Length Comprehension Rate:
8 words=100%,
15 words=90%,
19 words=80%,
28 words=50%.
Separate your thoughts by writing short sentences.
Don't try to string everything together using clauses
like and, but, and however. Just because your brain may
think in run-on sentences, doesn't mean you need to
write that way. In fact, long sentences often lose their
dramatic impact. What was important becomes lost in the
sea of never ending words. For example, read the
following sentence:
"It has come to my attention that the second Thursday of
the month is the best opportunity for development to meet
with management to review the latest technology advances
being made by our competitor and the ways our company is
prepared to deal with this direct attack at our company
vision of always being the first to introduce products
that improve the lives of consumers and make it easier
for them to use everyday business products like their
computers, PDA's, scanners, faxes and photo copiers."
Whew. What a mouthful. Try saying that sentence in one
breathe; it is 85 words. Totally off the scale of
comprehension. We need to start eliminating some words.
What Is Your Purpose
In order to rewrite our run-on sentence, we need to first
decide what our purpose was for writing the sentence. When
I look at the sentence it becomes obvious to me that we have
a couple of ideas that are getting buried in the dump of words:
1.Meetings with management the second Thursday of the month.
2.Meetings to discuss technology advances made by competitor.
3.Review of company vision.
I'm going to leave out the information about the company
vision because I don't feel it has any importance in the paragraph.
The company vision is something that would naturally occur
in the meeting discussion and isn't necessary to the purpose.
The Right Words
OK, now that we have our two basic ideas, we need to formulate
them into a logical, concise paragraph using short sentences.
Here's what I would say instead:
"Starting, in June 2005, the Product Management team will meet
the second Thursday of every month from 1 - 3 p.m. in room H-108.
The topic of discussion for the June meeting will be the recent
technology advances made by our competitor."
We now have a 41 word paragraph consisting of two sentences. The
first sentence is 23 words and the second sentence is 18 words.
According to our table, the first sentence is a little long.
However, every piece of information in that sentence is important
to the reader understanding the message. So, we just need to break
it up into two sentences. Here's our final rewrite:
"The Product Management team will meet the second Thursday of
every month. The first meeting is June 9, 2005, from 1 - 3 p.m.
in room H-108. The topic of discussion will be the recent technology
advances made by our competitor."
We now have a 40 word paragraph consisting of three sentences. The
first sentence is 12 words. The second sentence is 15 words. The third
sentence is 14 words. Notice how just these few changes made all the
difference in reading comprehension.
Get used to counting words when you put a message together. It's the
easiest trick I know to communicate effectively.