Perhaps you’ve heard the old adage, “time is money.” When it comes to doing business, that certainly is true. And business professionals don’t want to waste any of either one. Instead, they want to be as efficient as possible, using the minimum amount of resources needed to complete the job at hand. They want to manufacture quality products without wasting raw materials. They want to provide excellent customer service without scheduling too many employees for a shift. They certainly want to communicate effectively without wasting time speaking, writing, reading, or listening to more words than necessary.
Whether it is an email, a presentation, a report, or any other kind of message, business professionals prefer shorter to longer. In fact, many professionals are quick to admit they won’t read any email that requires them to scroll down. Hiring managers will stop reading cover letters that are too long. Some executives forbid their management team from presenting more than one slide at meetings.
Impatience with long messages underscores the importance of not wasting time—and not wasting words. But it’s not just impatience. Business consultant Joseph McCormack identifies chronic information overload, shrinking attention spans, and a glut of daily interruptions as key drivers for being more concise in all our communication (McCormick, 2014). Business professionals simply don’t have the time or mental energy to attend to long messages.
For these reasons, competent business communicators strive to be concise. Concise refers to the ability to present complete messages as efficiently as possible. As a result, concise message are faster for receivers to process and act upon and that is good for business. Below you will learn strategies for communicating more concisely.
Include Information Your Receiver Needs
In order to write a complete message, you must ensure your receivers have all of the information they need to respond to your message or take action. Understanding your receivers and how they will use your message is essential to deciding the right kind and amount of information to include.
Even on the same basic topic, different receivers have different needs for information. For instance, assume that you are announcing the launch of a new app. Top-level leaders in the company might need information to persuade investors to make a bigger investment. In that case, you should provide information on what the app is, when it will launch, and how it’s projected to impact sales. The sales team might need the information to sell the product to customers. You should emphasize the app features and how they differ from competitors’ apps or other apps you built in the past. You might need specific details from your development team to ensure that the launch will go off without a hitch. Your message to them may include more questions than answers: Are all the bugs fixed? Are all our ads ready to go? Are there any last-minute problems that need to be addressed?
In addition to your immediate goals, also remember to consider any future use that your receiver may have for your message. Whereas many messages will never get referred to again, others may be accessed at some point in the future. If your message is recording important decisions, sequences of events, or other activities, make sure to include details your receiver will need to know in the future.
Finally, test your message for completeness. For shorter messages, or those messages with lower stakes, you can simply review the message yourself. Put yourself in the position of your receiver, critically read through your message, and look for any missing pieces of information. Or you might look for specific answers to the 5 Ws and H: who, what, where, when, why, and how. For longer or higher-stakes messages, consider asking someone else to review the message for completeness. Being less familiar with a message helps people spot missing information more easily.
Here are some ways to cut extraneous information.
Tips for Cutting Unnecessary Information
Cut Information That Is Irrelevant to Your Receiver To write a concise message, you must eliminate any information your receiver doesn’t need. This is the step where you can make the biggest difference in terms of crafting briefer messages. Ideally Just because information is highly relevant to one individual doesn’t mean that it is relevant to your receiver. You must ask yourself, “Does my receiver care?” And if the answer is no, then cut the information.
Delete Warm-up Info Sometimes you might struggle with how to start a message, especially if it is a high-stakes message. If you don’t have exactly the right words—and sometimes if you don’t know the answer—you may start by freewriting the ideas on your mind. While this can be an effective strategy to get started writing, it rarely adds anything the receiver needs to act on the message.
Extraneous Content: You had asked that we all respond to this message with an idea for making the department greener. I thought about it for a long time and considered several options. Some of the ideas seemed really good at first, but weren’t very feasible. After much deliberation, I finally decided to recommend putting mixed-stream recycling bins on every floor.
Concise: My idea for making the department greener is putting mixed-stream recycling bins on every floor.
Remove Think-Out-Loud Information There will be times when you are writing when you will think not only about how to write something, but also about what you are writing. Maybe you are thinking about changing your position (Is this the best use of our limited funds?). Maybe you need to gather better support (I wonder if there is a more current market report available). Maybe you need to confirm facts before communicating them (I should double-check with our contractor on the timeline). When this happens, you may be tempted to put these “think-out-loud” questions or ideas into your messages. Sometimes there might be good reasons to do so, such as if you want to seek input from your receiver. But if you can get answers to your questions and then revise your message to incorporate those answers before sending it, you are bound to write far more concisely.
Replace Detail with a Summary Having too much detail can make your messages unnecessarily long. To make your message more concise, ask yourself how much detail your receiver needs. If your receiver only needs the big picture, then replace the detail with a summary instead.
Recap Instead of Quote Sometimes you may be required to recount talk, whether that is a conversation, a discussion at a meeting, or even a heated debate. Recapping is a special summarization technique that captures the essence of what has been said or what has been done. It can be useful for documenting personnel issues and minutes of meetings. Instead of providing a “transcript” of an interaction, you can be much more concise by capturing the main ideas of what was said or done.
Trim Word Count at a Sentence Level Even small edits can make a big difference when they are done consistently. You might only delete a word or two at a time, but removing extraneous qualifiers or redundant words can help with conciseness.
Attributions:
Information for this section was modified from
Business Communication: Five Core Competencies Copyright © 2023 by Kristen Lucas, Jacob D. Rawlins, and Jenna Haugen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
References:
McCormack, J. (2014). Brief: Make a bigger impact by saying less. Wiley.