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Writing Simple
I picked up on a post this morning from Michelle Golden from the Marcom Writer Blog titled Pruning Deadwood from your Copy. The author Dianna Huff offers five solid tips for streamlining your content:
- Keep yourself to a specific word count
- Don’t fall in love with your copy
- Hunt down redundancies
- Print out the piece and look at it
- Consider *every* word
Knowing what an experienced group of writers we have here at Slaw, I was wondering if anyone would be willing to add to this list? Do you have a simple writing technique or strategy that trims volume or creates clarity?
It depends on where the copy is being published and who the audience is. For the average reader on the web I would use:
– headings
– lists (as you have done)
and avoid:
– difficult words
– slang
I do like my bullet lists. :) And especially with web copy, which often goes unread unless it can be easily scanned.
Two other tips I’ve received in the past:
1) write two shorter sentences over one longer one; and
2) keep the amount of bold, italics and underlining to a minimum.
Pick one word that represents the theme of your written item, then check the rest of the item to see whether it supports that theme. This tip is from an article by the Poynter Institute, a US journalism school. The link: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=13061