In this recent piece for PR Daily, Daphne Gray-Grant instructs journalists and corporate writers to quote less and paraphrase more. Her whole article is worth a read, but business writers should pay special attention to one point: business writing and speech is often full of clichés and jargon.
The problem goes beyond interviews. Too often, marketing materials of all types are puffed up with filler words that, on a closer read, reveal themselves to be more or less meaningless. In other cases, a worthwhile message is hidden in specialized language and a tone that won’t convey anything to the intended audience.
Strategic communications require carefully-developed talking points that cut through the jargon and filler and get to a company or organization’s core messaging. Without attention to message development, all the media outreach in the world won’t help a business tell its story.
As an exercise, Gray-Grant chooses the most interesting, relevant quotes from the Carl Hart interview she references. Take a look at your own communications. If you could save only three sentences from each of your current materials, what would they be?
Try it. Copy the three core sentences from your website’s About page, your boilerplate or most recent marketing materials. Set the excerpts aside for now. Come back to them tomorrow, and build a new piece around what you’ve saved, without going back to the old version. Try to write something stronger, that says more with less. Resist the urge to depend on trendy adjectives that don’t convey specifics. Avoid highly-specialized industry terms that are better suited to internal than external communications.
Compare your new piece to the former version. Were you able to express what you wanted to say in a more compelling way? Let us know on Twitter @prosperstrat!
