Writing Concisely
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Writing Concisely

How many times have you lost focus deciphering a meandering email? Or started reading a memo with a tl;dr that was too long so you didn't read it either? Writing concisely is an important skill, especially at a company like Meta that "Moves Fast" and expects employees to keep up with constant updates while also working demanding, full-time jobs.

Harvard Business Review published a helpful editorial on "How to Write Concisely" in which they recommend to:

1. Delete words that don’t add anything to your sentence.

2. Cut the overlap.

3. Instead of telling us what you’re going to do in a sentence, just do it.

I recently led an offsite where we put HBR's advice into practice with the following exercise:

  • Pick a topic (e.g., Taylor Swift, french fries or attachment theories).
  • Set a timer for 2 minutes and write as much as you can about your chosen theme.
  • After the timer expires, count how many words you wrote.
  • Set your timer again for another 2 minutes and challenge yourself to cut the word count in half.

What other tips have you found helpful (bonus points if you comment on this article with your score)?

Happy writing!

Jonathan Kayes

Data Professional

9 个月

I haven't done the exercise, but when I was a writing tutor in college, we reviewed the "Paramedic Method," which has seven steps for making your writing more concise. To apply it to what I just wrote: I haven't done the exercise, but when I worked as a college writing tutor we reviewed the "Paramedic Method" to write more concisely. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/paramedic_method.html

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