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March 2004
By Brian O'Grady Making lean text read fat Q: We work hard to use as few words as possible in online writing. However, every time a draft comes back from management it says "more meat" or "flesh this out" or "doesn't look professional enough". How do you deal with this? A: This is one of the banes of online writing. The others are stale bagels and bad coffee. Properly emaciated online texts can look skeletal compared to typical documents and text-bloated web sites. The solution may lie with your graphic designer. There are three common reasons lean documents are fattened up before appearing online. The first is that many people aren't aware of the short attention spans of online readers. The second is word processor drafts that look and read well but appear too short on a web page which often uses smaller fonts and formatting. And the third reason is "consultant-speak". The large fees earned by many large consultancies can't be explained in plain language. Compare these two samples: 1. "Clients benefit from our experience by saving money and time." 2. "Enterprise partners identify and capture cost and temporal efficiencies through leveraging the wealth of knowledge capital available in a trusted business relationship." The first sentence is much better in terms of clear communication, but you can probably only charge $25 for providing that service. The second sentence challenges comprehension, says the exact same thing, but the service it describes is more likely to be worth $25,000. God help you when you encounter this kind of rubbish. You may be better off moonlighting as an effective communicator elsewhere than waging the war of ideology required to change the philosophy in your work place. If your boss doesn't like you having another job, explain that you're "developing a vertically integrated skill set to take advantage of the open management system and day extension opportunities." Rather than appear confused, your boss may respond with "Ok, but don't let it negatively impact your current core function" before leaving to edit more web copy. So how do you fatten appropriately lean text? Call on your friendly neighbourhood graphic designer before submitting a draft. You don't need to create a full mock up, but your existing web pages already contain style features you can use in your draft. The addition of a couple horizontal lines, a larger title, interesting bulleted lists and maybe some creative paragraph spacing can make your lean mean text look and feel fat. Learn a few of these tricks and you can probably do the next 'fat' draft yourself with your word processor. These style features add context to your writing and also eat up a lot of white space without looking out of place. Failing that, all you can do when you encounter 'consultant-speak' is tell the author it reads like an amorphous deposit of biodegradable fecal matter from a male bovine. Brian O'Grady is a senior writer with Pens 4 Hire, a professional writing firm with a unique appreciation for audience. Between writing tasks for high-tech, government and non-profits, Brian tries to learn proper grouting technique for his bathroom tile. |