The above quote from Mark Twain is one of my favorite quotes of all time.  That, and “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Both quotes get to a similar point… the goal of any communication is to be as brief as possible while still delivering the necessary information.  Too often as writers, we get lost in the lovely flow of words, or the sound of our voice, or we try to cram as much information as possible in whatever piece we are writing because we’re not sure what is actually important in what we are trying communicate.

Today, I was reviewing a draft of a positioning document from someone on my team.  The first page of the doc was two paragraphs.  You could say that there should be more than two paragraphs on any given page; else it is too dense for anyone to process.  More importantly. there was a lot of valuable information crammed into these two paragraphs, but I would submit that there was too much information in those paragraphs.  With all that information, how is the reader supposed to figure out what truly matters?

Eliminating words is tough.  But what you don’t say is frequently more important than what you do say.  If you focus on what truly matters, then your message will pop off the page.  Every product or solution needs to stand for something.  And every communiqué has a primary purpose.

One of my favorite exercises is to write something, and then see how I can write it shorter.  Evaluate every idea.  Does it truly need to be there?  Does it add incremental value?  Does it subtract from other concepts?  What happens it you eliminate a concept?  A sentence?  A word? 

Effective communication requires focus.  You have to know what you want to say, to whom you want to say it, and how you want to say it.  You have to know what matters.  If you don’t know, or can’t figure it out, then you wind up writing yourself to a conclusion, and most readers don't want to go on the journey with you.  They just want to show up at the destination.

In the words of my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Diane Young at McDonogh School , MD, “A good piece of writing is like a woman’s skirt.  Long enough to cover the point, but short enough to be interesting.”  While that statement may be a bit sexist, I will comment that 1) it came from my female middle-school teacher, and 2) she did have a point.