Stop Writing Like a Committee: The Wall of Text Is Not a Strategy
Long paragraphs are a hiding place for bad ideas. If I have to excavate your point, you have failed. Cut the waffle.
The Terms and Conditions Email
I received a monthly update email yesterday that looked like the Terms and Conditions for an iTunes update.
It was a solid block of grey text. No breaks. No bolding. Just a stream of consciousness about “optimizing the synergistic pathways of the cross-channel attribution model.”
I stared at it. I tried to read the first sentence. I gave up. I archived it.
The writer probably spent an hour crafting that email. They probably thought it looked very professional and “thorough.” In reality, it was rubbish. It was a visual assault on the reader.
We write like this because we are scared. We think that if we write in long, winding sentences, we sound smarter. Or, more likely, we write long sentences because we haven’t actually decided what the point is yet, so we just keep typing until we hope the reader figures it out.
The Clutter: The Passive Voice Blanket
The enemy of insight is the “Committee Voice.” You know the tone. It is passive. It is vague. It avoids responsibility.
- Bad: “It has been noted that there were some fluctuations in the performance metrics which are currently being investigated by the team with a view to resolution.”
What does that even mean? It means “Sales are down and we don’t know why.” But the writer was too terrified to say that.
When you present a Wall of Text, you are signaling two things:
- I am disorganized. I couldn’t be bothered to edit this.
- I am hiding. I am burying the bad news in the middle of paragraph four.
The Clarity: The Bullet Point Scalpel
We need to take a scalpel to our prose. I have a rule for my team: If it can be a list, it must be a list.
Lists are magical. They force you to separate ideas. They create white space. White space allows the brain to breathe.
Here is how we rewrote that “Terms and Conditions” email:
- Headline: Performance is down 5% (Investigation Underway).
- The Issue: A tracking pixel failed on Tuesday.
- The Impact: We lost visibility on roughly 200 leads.
- The Fix: Engineering is patching it now. Back online by 2:00 PM.
[TO EDITOR: Image of two emails side-by-side. Left: A dense block of grey text (The Wall). Right: The same content broken into 4 bullet points with bold headers (The List). Arrow pointing to the right labeled “Readable in 10 seconds”.]
Spot on. No jargon. No hiding.
The client knows exactly what happened. They know you are on top of it. They don’t have to excavate the truth from a pile of words.
Writing short is hard. It requires you to know exactly what you mean. But it is the only way to get heard in a world where everyone is skimming. Stop waffling. Get to the point.
FAQs
Does short writing sound rude?
Wasting someone's time is rude. Being concise is the highest form of politeness.
What if I need to explain the nuance?
Nuance is often just a lack of decision. If you must, put the nuance in a footnote.
My boss likes long, formal emails.
Your boss likes feeling important. Write the summary at the top for their brain, and the long text below for their ego.