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I am busy. I am at the computer from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. And frankly, I have no interest in a long, self-indulgent digression about a guy who had a car accident or someone else who was fighting a parking ticket. I wanted the Google lawsuit story, but not enough to sit through Greenspan's verbal diarrhea. So I quit.
The Takeaways
• People are busy. In business memos, notes, e-mails, letters, white papers and articles, get to the point and stay on message.
• When Ernest Hemingway finished writing a novel, he stuck it in a desk drawer and took off for three months. He went deep-sea fishing, hunted in Africa or made the bullfight circuit in Spain. When he returned, he read his prose afresh and right away could see where cuts should be made. Obviously, we can't wait three months to circulate a memo. But try to wait a day and then go over the thing from the point of view of a first-time reader.
• "I am reminded of a fishing trip to Maine when we used dry flies with barbless hooks. Unless you kept up the tension all the way to the net, you lost the trout. A reader should feel the same sort of tension. If not … reel in the slack," copywriter Malcolm Decker has said.
• Some writers read their copy aloud into a tape recorder. If they stumble and get twisted in the knickers of their syntax, it is quickly obvious that some rewriting is in order.
• Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. In Greenspan's prose above, one sentence is 47 words. The last sentence runs 59 words. Too long.
I downloaded Greenspan's two-part blog and filed it away under "Google" in my archive of news stories. Maybe I'll read it if I do a story on Google lawsuits. Then again, maybe not.
Denny Hatch is a freelance direct marketing consultant and copywriter, and author of the e-mail newsletter, Denny Hatch's Business Common Sense. Visit him at www.businesscommonsense.com or www.dennyhatch.com, or contact him via e-mail at dennyhatch@yahoo.com.
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