Clarity and Economy

Martins Blog

I was helping a major client the other day with a paper that was being produced for their Board.

It was an internal document created to request funding for a new market area that shows real promise. The problem was that it was written in such a way that it had no chance of gaining the executive support it needed.

What I saw is not untypical. It lacked punch, the language lacked clarity and, as ever, there was too much detail. Overall the document was too long and dull. This is nothing new. As Board member myself of a large company I was regularly assailed with lengthy tomes that were neither compelling or brief enough to gain my attention.

Its a fact that better presented propositions will always do better than those that are presented badly (sometimes regardless of the merits of the proposals). Every salesperson knows this, but people forget that its important to sell your ideas inside your company too.

In this case the document had been created by a couple of vertical market experts, and its natural for an expert to want to show their expertise, especially if they think that their views are to be widely read. What an expert often misses is that you just want them to communicate with clarity and economy.

I proposed an interesting challenge that I have tried before. I asked the expert for a maximum of 10 words to summarise their paper.

I wanted just the 10 most important words. These words could form a sentence; more often they are ten individual words and each word describes an essential concept, request or fact.

When you have agreed the 10 words. Ask for 1 sentence for each. You will end up with 10 sentences, and this is the core of your document.

More will need to be added, but only if it aids clarity and readability. Its often the case that you can end with 200-300 words saying more than 2,000 did before.