Give your company a voice
1. Don’t overload your sentences!
If you’re like me, you will need to constantly fight the irresistible urge to pack too much information into a single sentence. According to the Plain English Campaign, the average sentence should ideally be between 15 and 25 words for readability. So instead of cramming too many facts into one extremely long sentence, cut extraneous information and break it into several sentences to improve readability.
2.
Did you know that civil servants have been banned from using meaningless buzzwords and told to use Plain English instead? In a victory for commonsense, Whitehall officials have been instructed not to use long words where short ones will do – ‘buy’ instead of ‘purchase,’ ‘help’ instead of ‘assist’, ‘like’ instead of ‘such as’ and ‘use’ instead of ‘utilise’, for example.
Bureaucrats have also been forbidden from using Americanisms like “fill out a form” rather than “fill in a form”.
It’s one thing knowing how to write correctly and quite another to be able to do so with style and flair. In my experience, it’s that indefinable something which separates out those who write perfectly serviceable business communications as part of their job and those who write for a living. There are various literary devices to add colour to your writing – metaphors, similes and hyperbole, to name just a few – but this week’s post focuses on alliteration and wordplay.
