The best advice anyone’s giving me regarding clearer communication is to write as Aryton Senna drove: fast. Take the shortest route and get there as quickly as possible. Remove all excess baggage. When done, look back and see if you can go even quicker.

That leads me to ask how did this badly written nonsense get past anyone in marketing and make it to their home page?

“The Content Group is a technology agnostic Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consultancy and solutions provider whose proven ECM Expert best practice methodology ensures successful ECM projects for their clients across the globe”

What? Who on earth speaks like this within this firm? Cisco is one of the world’s greatest tech companies; you wont find any such drivel on their massive site. Or Microsoft’s. Or Nokia’s.

Another example is something like this:

Last week the dates for the next courses and workshops were finalised. These are the dates…

Does it matter that you finalised last week or last month? Why not just give us the info? It could become:

The dates of our courses and workshops are… [8 words vrs 20 = 60% less. It could be even shorter.]

We’re all bombarded with content, so help us out by getting straight to the point. An excellent business writing book is Read This by Robert Gentle. It has loads of suggestions that will help readers understand you better. Definitely one for your Christmas book list if you’re any sort of copy writer.