Finding the Right Balance of Words

How well is your message understood?

Most people tend to ramble on and on when writing a business

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.

Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Michelle Howe

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