Write Tight(er): Get to the Point and Save Millions

This article originally appeared, with slight differences, on the Confab 2015 site.

Why I Talk about Tight Writing

We all use too many words. In and of itself, cutting unhelpful words (or sentences, or paragraphs, or whole chapters or blog posts) doesn’t make writing good. But it always makes writing better.

How Tight Writing Can Save Companies Millions

One reason to care about conciseness is money. Extra words carry dollar signs—especially if your company publishes in multiple languages. If you tighten before you translate, you can save staggering amounts of money.

As Val Swisher, author of Global Content Strategy: A Primer, says, when you tighten your sentences, you achieve “the ultimate trifecta: cheaper, better, faster translations.”

The “cheaper” part of that trifecta comes down to simple math, as you see in this spreadsheet example. This “before” and “after” show how I tightened a sentence from the book Death in the Afternoon, written by Mr. Minimalism himself, Ernest Hemingway—and the kind of translation savings that you can realize by tightening sentences. (Hat tip to John McGloon, who introduced me to the idea of creating a spreadsheet like this.)

challenge-question-percentage

Hemingway’s sentence (the “before” example) has 17 words: “Write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.” Remove four words, and you increase the sentence’s impact without losing any meaning or sacrificing sonorousness. More impressively, at least from a business point of view, this kind of edit reduces translation cost. At 25 cents per word per language (a common translation rate), cutting these four words reduces the cost of translating this sentence into 25 languages by $25.

Not impressed? Scale up to 10,000 sentences. (That’s how many you’ll find in a typical Harry Potter novel. Many websites contain far more.) Reduce each sentence’s word count by this same percentage, and you save $250,000.

If your company delivers lots of translated content and tightens its text by even ten percent, it can save millions—or tens of millions or hundreds of millions—every year.

Whether you’re a writer or a strategist who works with writers, imagine the raise you’ll justify when you routinely save your employer or clients this kind of money.

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But Money Isn’t Everything

Even if your words never get translated, and even if you don’t care what it costs to produce and maintain unnecessary words, you care about losing readers. Concise means readable. Concise means comprehensible. Concise means efficient. No reader—no customer—abides bloat.

When you lose readers, when you lose customers, you lose.

My Favorite Tightening Technique

Dump these words unless you need them. That’s it. That’s my favorite tightening technique. Simple and surprisingly powerful. (If you’ve seen my “Write Tight(er)” presentation, you’ll recognize this as my “Dump These Words” list.)

weak be-verbs (is, was, were, will be, have been, am, are)
–ly words (& other vapid adverbs)
very, such, so (& other empty intensifiers)
not, no (& other negative words)
the fact that
just
begin to, try to, tend to, in order to
period of time
in light of, in spite of, in terms of (& of in general)
proverbial
different (as in many different, 36 different)
particular
verbiage
any other verbiage* ~~or unneeded words that you can pitch~~

*Verbiage includes redundancies of all kinds. See “‘I Used to Be an Ex-Manager’ & 1000 Other Redundancies.”

Let’s Play a Game!

Every week, I post a “Tighten This!” Challenge Question—and announce the previous week’s winners. Want to play? Want a shot of fun while building your concise-writing skills with word-loving friends? Want to edify your inner editor? Subscribe to my blog under the heading “Sign Up!” (above right or, on a mobile device, all the way at the bottom). Then, each time I publish a post, you’ll receive an email.