Adding words is easy.
But more words don’t necessarily add to more clarity.
As the Occam’s Razor principle implies, you should use as few words as possible to explain – and no more.
More words = confusion.
More words are likely to be filler fluff.
More words = potential to lose your reader or viewer or listener.
You, or someone else has to be kindly brutal, trimming the fat, without cutting into the muscle.
More is less, and less is more.
Adding more words to a message is easy.
It usually adds up to simply being more noise.
The ability to remove unnecessary, extraneous words, which add nothing to a narrative, is the main trick we need in our writing.
What we leave out, the stuff that’s superfluous to the story, is how we demonstrate clarity of offer.
The temptation is always lurking to throw in another verb, to over-season with an additional adjective.
Resist…resist.
For all storytelling, more is less and less is more.
Musicians play the notes, maestros play the pauses.
Imagine you read, “XYZ company, delivering creative solutions collaboratively, while empowering intelligent customer synergies”.
Do you have a clue what they do?
Have any of the words they’ve used to describe themselves provided points of difference compared to competitors?
Would this first statement encourage further exploration of a website?
The answer is unlikely – unless of course mediocrity flicks your switch.
Of course no one would (hopefully!) use such an assemblage of these generic words to describe themselves.
But you do see a fair sprinkling of what are essentially meaningless words polluting businesses first messages.
Such empty words are used out of laziness, frustration and desperation.
They’re employed when people don’t think deeply enough about what they’re trying to express, and also forget the immense resource that is a thesaurus.
The use of generic words also means there’s no metaphor on which someone can picture what you provide.
There’s no term to connect with a heart, appeal to a soul.
Yet businesses continue to use such hollow words.
If you’re trying to craft your own Million Dollar Message, your best bet is to ban meaningless words before you start, totally eliminate them as starters.
You’ll be doing yourself and your potential customers a giant favour.