On OverWriting
Hi. My name’s Gwen, and I’m an overwriter.
I have it on reliable authority that there are, in the world—right here among us!—people who struggle to fill out a word count. Folks who blow up their fonts or add visuals to make a piece seem longer. Who move their page margins in. Can you imagine?
I am not one of those people.
I love a saga. I enjoy twisting my way through a long-winded aside. I always want more, more, more! Texture! Richness! Explanation! Backstory! Why say something once when you can say it four times? I love a list; all lists need at least three elements, in my opinion; and I need a lot of lists. I prefer my paragraphs to be at least ten lines long. I never met a subordinate clause I didn’t love. If I’ve said it once, I’d better say it again. And again.
In writing jargon, I’m what you would call an associative writer. One idea makes me think of another, and I add and I add, and before you know it, my cute little 250-word post is a 5,000-word monster.
See? Here I am, going on and on again.
And I know I’m not alone.
Lots of people overwrite, for lots of reasons. The results are generally not great.
Overwriting can really weaken your work. It can mean your writing is misunderstood or just plain ignored.
Sometimes, people overwrite because they’re trying to be respectful, deferential. To avoid difficulties.
I’ve worked with more than one team that worries about offending its very particular clients. How do you avoid sounding abrupt or rude in an email? And what do you do when you need to communicate a real problem to a client?
Often, people think the answer is to talk around things—especially when things have gone wrong. So they hedge, they describe at length, they couch everything in many layers of politeness and apology. (My Canadian-raised self appreciates this). They bury the point.
The result: those very particular clients usually can’t understand what’s being said. And—worse—they may assume that all that extra verbiage is there to mislead them. They might think they‘re actually being taken advantage of somehow.
The team members are aiming for peace by overwriting. But what they’ve ended up with is extra stress.
Sometimes, folks overwrite because they’re trying to follow the rules as they’ve been taught ‘em—and they don’t have a better model.
I’ve met lots of junior staffers who learned, in their college programs, to get who-what-when-where-why-how into an epic, multi-clause single sentence at the beginning of each piece of writing. Then: expand on each point in the lede, describing and redescribing, getting every detail in, until all sense of order and clarity is lost and a 250-word piece has ballooned to 800 words.
And lots of times, people overwrite because they don’t trust their own arguments.
Thought leaders and entrepreneurs fall victim to this pitfall as often as junior analysts. When the stakes are high and you have to look smart, it’s tempting to fill your work with fancy prose. But that tendency will backfire on you, because your overdecorated language can make it really hard to find your argument.
When you’re writing as a professional, it’s best to keep it short and sweet.
Ideally, every pitch is a sonnet in prose form. Every client email is a haiku. A slide in a deck should feel like a William Carlos Williams poem: tiny, exacting, resonant, memorable.
How can you possibly do that?
Well, first there’s pre-writing, and then there’s editing.
To keep myself from writing War and Peace when I’m asked to assemble a deck, I start with prewriting. That means I figure things out before I start drafting.
I articulate my goal to myself.
I ask myself questions. I make notes. I assemble my information. I create a good narrative outline to keep myself on track.
The idea is that by the time I start drafting, I’ll have a framework I can fill in, and I won’t be tempted to pad.
But I am often tempted.
Writing is thinking, so it doesn’t always go according to plan.
I often think of great! new! ideas! right in the middle of things, and I love a tangent. So I rely on editing to reign myself in.
I use a three-stage editing technique to root out repetition, stick to my goal and keep my prose sleek.
I kill my darlings.
I edit for the big stuff first. I look for repetition. I am ruthless with my lists.
And I try to keep my intended reader in mind when I edit. What do they care about? What will convince them to take action? What voice will reach them best?
Getting to the point can feel impossible when you’re lost in the dark woods of a writing project. But in goal-driven writing, it’s everything. And with the right tools, you can definitely get there.
If you’re struggling with over-writing, or members of your team could use some training in clear, concise, precise business writing, let’s talk.