Guff, stuff and puff - taking the wind out of wordiness.

The other day I spent six hours in a meeting with no break, no exit and no food. It was six hours of guff, stuff and puff. I got hangry with the people who filled those hours with more words than I could digest on an empty stomach.

Of course guff, stuff and puff don’t just ruin meetings. More often these types of wind prevail in an organisation’s communications with its customers.

In my work I edit out wordiness. I train colleagues to respect their readers, keep ideas clear and add a little humanity where they can.

There are six ways to spot writing that’s full of wind. They are guff, stuff, puff, bluff, huff and fluff.

Guff is a term made great by Lucy Kellaway, who wrote about it in the Financial Times. Guff gets going when people use words they believe make them sound unique. They do 110 per cent of their blue sky thinking outside the box of pushed envelopes from which ground breaking experiences are delivered on burning platforms.

You know the type.

Stuff happens when speakers and writers pad out sentences with unnecessary descriptors. They scatter words like a farmer sows seeds hoping that some will stick and grow a thought. With such descriptors there is a very real and present danger that as they fight side by side, they will very bigly lose the battle for our attention.

Puff puts the importance of the writer before their audience. Puff was established a long time ago by organisations that were delighted to announce that their strategic aim was of more importance than any benefit to their customers, or than any reason to read on.

Bluff is a little like padding out, but it steals a march with words borrowed from other types of business, so that the writer sounds as if they have lots of cross industry experience. In the end all they do is cause confusion.

For example a bank will ‘migrate’ customers’ accounts, without spending the summer on the other side of the planet. It will ‘expire’ loans without taking a breath to think how silly it sounds. It will ‘relay’ ideas to third parties without ever passing a baton.

Huff happens when there ought to be fewer words. If less is more, then fewer words are better. The right words will always stick. And the best ones for the job are usually those which are short, simple and have few syllables. That’s why many of our curse words are so short, FFS.

Finally fluff. It nestles neatly in the navel of superfluity. Some writers feel naked without dressing up nouns with adjectives and verbs with adverbs. Yet many strong words are best left to stand alone.

Why for example, must we sincerely apologise when saying sorry is more powerful? I believe the more we write sincerely, the less we sound so. Or consider this sentence where a good verb is imprisoned in an abstract noun: “The commencement of the project is set for 6 February”. Whereas, “The project starts on 6 February” say it like it is and with more action.

Let your words earn their keep by doing the job they were coined for.

Some people will take hours to say what I’ve covered here. Others have written entire books on the subject of writing with your reader in mind - yet I’ve hardly kept you from your lunch. Here you have food for thought about respecting your reader, keeping things clear and writing like a human being.