Quick! Which of these paragraphs would you rather read? This 11-word paragraph, from The New York Times?

Until then, Mr. Stratton waits and continues his daily balancing act.

Or this 146-word paragraph from an Amazon release?

Paragraphs are visual cues.

That’s the problem with long paragraphs: Readers make decisions about your message based not on what you said or on how well you said it but on what it looks like after you’ve said it.

“Long paragraphs are a visual predictor that a story won’t work.”

— Jon Ziomek, associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism

And paragraph length is one of your message’s most important visual cues.

“Long paragraphs are a visual predictor that a story won’t work,” says Jon Ziomek, associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism.

So how long is too long for a paragraph?

Write like the Times.

We turned to The New York Times to find out. We analyzed 99 stories in a single edition of the paper. (We skipped the sports pages.) On that day, the Times’ paragraph length:

• Ranged from 9.6 to 67.5 words long
• Averaged 36 words per paragraph.
• Weighed in at a median of 37 words per paragraph.

Why are PR paragraphs so long?

PR pros: Take a tip from the Times and make your paragraphs short and sweet. Avoid long PR paragraphs like this 108-word paragraph from an SBA release:

And this 126-word paragraph from Fabletics:

If your paragraphs are 100 and 200 words long, readers will skip them. Instead break up longer paragraphs into shorter paragraphs.

Still concerned about the old hard-and-fast rule of thumb for paragraph construction for academic writing that you learned in English class? A good paragraph has a topic sentence, three developing sentences and a concluding sentence?

This ain’t academic writing! Good writers write press release and blog-post paragraphs that get read. Need a line break? Hit return more often. (Add that to your style guide!)

Make ’em punchy.

While you’re at it, why not break up your copy with some super-short paragraphs like these from the Times, which weigh in at …

16 words

And yet Mr. Monis had repeatedly come to the attention of community leaders and the authorities.

14 words

Its broadband package is also the home to the sports broadcaster ESPN in Britain.

13 words

Glen Hauenstein, Delta’s chief revenue officer, was running with the theme last week.

12 words

In February, the activist investor raised its bid to $21 a share.

11 words

“No matter what I did, I couldn’t find peace,” he said.

9 words

Apple could pay more than $350 million in damages.

Now, those are paragraphs that go down easy.

What’s your average paragraph length?

How long should the lead paragraph be?

“‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ The creation of the universe has a 10-word lead! So why do you need 40 words to say that your chief accountant has just completed the necessary certification? The answer, of course, is you don’t.”

— John McIntyre, copy desk chief of the Baltimore Sun

Yet PR pros keep cranking out leads like this 99-word one from an Amazon release:

How long should PR leads be?

Keep your release and pitch lead to 25 words — a couple of sentences — or so.

Longer, and it starts looking too thick to encourage readership.

Shorter, and news portals might not recognize it as a lead paragraph — or your release as a release. Google News, for instance, rejects releases that are nothing but bullet points and one-sentence paragraphs. Advisory releases often get rejected for this reason.

To avoid this, start with a “real” paragraph that includes at least two sentences.

Limit the background in the lead.

One way to take the lead out of the lead: Limit the background to no more than six words.

Background information is any parenthetical information — information that appears between commas, parentheses or dashes, like this phrase — including:

• People’s titles or ages after their names: (“Chris Smith, 29, proofreading guru, says …”)
• Boilerplate descriptions of your company or products (“RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, is now available …”)
• Stock exchange symbols (“Apple Inc. (AAPL) today announced that …”)

That doesn’t mean that these things aren’t important or that you won’t include them in your piece. Just be selective with what and how much you put in the lead. Then move the rest down.

You want your lead to clip along quickly. But background information slows the top of the story down.

If the verb is the story in news releases (and it is), the story (weak though it may be) in this Guardian release got buried under 28 words, 20 of them background information:

Now, that story is a far cry from the creation of the universe. But that lead is nearly six times as long.

Start with a bang.

And make the most of those first few words. Otherwise, you’ll lose journalists.

“If the copy doesn’t excite me within 20 words, I won’t read the rest of it,” says one editor quoted by Jack Appleman, president of SG Communications.

Here, by the way, are the first 20 words of that Amazon release:

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that it has contracted with EDP Renewables to construct …

Snooooooooooooooze.

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Tick tock.

In the time it takes you to wash your hands, buckle your seat belt or start the dishwasher, your favorite journalist can finish reading your news release.

That’s right: Nearly 70% of journalists spend less than a minute reading a news release, according to a recent study by Greentarget. The rest spend one to five minutes.

So if your release is longer than 200 words, seven out of 10 journalists won’t finish it.

Why so short?

No wonder reporters don’t linger over your release:

• 45% of journalists surveyed get 50 or more releases per week.
• 21% get at least 100 per week.
• 40% get 10 to 50.

These folks are drowning in an ocean of content. Plus, years of media downsizing and increasing demands on journalists to produce digital content mean that their time is even more constrained.

As a result, “releases that are too long” is the fourth biggest pet peeve of the journalists surveyed by Greentarget. (“Releases that are poorly written” — ouch! — is No. 3.)

So how can you write a press release that’s short enough for everyone from small-business owners to search engines to love?

To reach these folks, you need to send a press release that’s attention grabbing — and no more than one-minute long.

How long is a one-minute release?

So how short is that?

To find out, you need to figure A.R.T., or average reading time.

Writers measure copy in words, inches or pages. Readers use a different measure: time.

So instead of using writer-centric measures, think like your reader and measure in time, suggests Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at The Poynter Institute and author of Writing Tools.

Clark figures the average adult can read 200 words per minute. So to find A.R.T., divide your word count by 200.

So if your release is 400 words long, it will take two minutes to read.

You can also start with A.R.T. and divide by 200 words per minute to get your word count.

So if you are aiming for a one-minute release, you’ll want to limit it to 200 words.

200 words?

200 words.

Reduce the piece.

Journalists’ A.R.T. is just one reason to reduce the length of your release. If your release is:

• Longer than 700 words, Google News may reject it for being too long.
• Longer than 500 words, portals may truncate your release.

Plus, reading online is onerous. Releases of 200 words or so are easier on real readers’ eyes.

But don’t make it too short. If your release is:

• Shorter than 125 words, Google News may reject it for being too short.

Releases are too long.

Yet despite these guidelines, PR pros persist in writing really long releases.

We ran a quick sample of PR Newswire releases and found that they weighed in at a median of 600 words. That’s a three-minute read.  They ranged as high as 1,723 words — about a 9-minute read.

Some PR pros on the other hand, are finding ways to drastically reduce the length of their releases:

• Nokia cuts its earnings release to 41 words.
• Pizza Hut famously introduced a new product with this 19-word release: “‘There’s bacon. In the crust! You’re welcome, America!’ said country music superstar and Stuffed Crust pizza aficionado Blake Shelton.”
• Christopher S. Penn boils his releases down to tweets.
• And I’m nuts for this one-word release.

How long are your releases? Would they be twice as good if they were half as long?

How to write a short pitch.

J.W. Elphinstone’s “Business Watercooler” feature for the Associated Press is just 200 words long. Why, then, do PR pros send her product or service pitches that are longer than that — even PowerPoint presentations with 30 slides?

Call it “AKK,”The New York Times’ acronym for “all known knowledge.” Your job isn’t to forward everything there is to know about your topic; your job is to find a tight story angle on the topic and to write an effective press release or pitch for the media.

So keep your pitches short. How short?

1. Keep it to three paragraphs.

Your pitch should be, at most, three paragraphs, suggests Peter Shankman, creator of Help a Reporter Out, or HARO.

That’s maybe 100 to 150 words. Include:

• The story angle. Focus on how this story will affect the journalists’ readers. Keep it the length of a social media post — a sentence or two. (Signal this in the subject line — in 40 characters or less.)
• What makes this story different. In the body copy, use bullet points or a couple of paragraphs to explain why your news story is a good idea for this outlet’s target audience.
• Contact information. Don’t forget important information like your email address and phone number.

Then “Best, Your Name” and out.

2. Make it 150 words.

The most effective pitches are short — 100 to 150 words. To keep yours fast and efficient, answer these four questions:

• Why you? Target the journalists and bloggers you pitch. Start with a personal greeting, and slant your story to their media outlet, column or segment.
• Why this? Give just enough detail to demonstrate that this story is different and worth covering.
• Why now? Create a sense of urgency. Show that this isn’t a generic, evergreen story but a story that should be covered right now. Make your lead timely or link it to a hot topic.
• Why us? Give an indication of authority and credibility. Without blah-blahing your spokesperson’s whole bio, show that she’s a credible —maybe even controversial — figure.

3. Think cocktail party.

When Barbara Goldberg, vice president of New York PR firm Belsito & Co., pitches a story, she thinks, “How could I get a friend at a cocktail party interested in two minutes or less?”

To promote the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, for instance, Goldberg pitched this story:

Too many of us know someone who went into the hospital for treatment of a common infection or even elective surgery — and never came out. The culprit is severe sepsis, which is treatable in most cases but needlessly remains one of the nation’s leading causes of death. It strikes two out of every 100 hospital admissions in the United States and kills 215,000 people each year, more than lung, colon and breast cancer combined.

4. Pass the one-leg test.

When expert PR professionals pitch by phone, they do so while standing on one leg. When their foot hits the floor, their pitch comes to an end.

So test your pitch. Read it aloud while standing on one leg. If you can’t finish before the second foot drops, you need to cut some copy.

Or time your pitch. Rick Frishman, president of Planned Television Arts, recommends that you limit your pitch to:

• 30 seconds of spoken word for print
• 10-20 seconds for radio and television

If your short pitch is good enough, he says, you’ll buy more time to sell your story.

Tease, don’t tell.

The job of the pitch is to pique the media’s interest, not to deliver all known knowledge. So just because you know it doesn’t mean it has to show up in the pitch.

Remember, you can always link to the full release for details. But don’t include the full release in your pitch.

And, please, no PowerPoint presentations.

___

Sources: “Why Your Release Might Not Make It In to Google News,” BusinessWired, March 24, 2010

Rebecca Corliss and Mike Volpe, “How to Be Smarter Than Your PR Agency: New Research on News Release Best Practices,” HubSpot, May 20, 2009

“Perfect Email Pitches: Master PR Scribes Reveal How to Craft Copy That Turns Heads and Earns Media Ink,” Bulldog Reporter’s PR University teleseminar, Sept. 18, 2008

“Turning complex into catchy,” Media Relations Report, September 2004

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More than 80 years of readability research demonstrate that short words are easiest to read and understand. In fact, word length is the No. 1 predictor of readability.

We spend a lot of time talking about the magic number of words for blog content and other messages. Should you write longer articles or short posts?

What’s the sweet spot for attention spans? 200 words? 500 words? 2,000 words? And what role do search engines and keyword research play in these decisions.

But the real question about the best word length for blog posts isn’t average word count. It’s the number of characters per word.

Whether you’re writing a longer post or other types of content, keep your word length to five characters or less. (I know you can do it, because The New York Times does it every day.

Here are five ways to keep your words short:

1. Find long words.

Use your word count tool to find the average length of your words in characters. If it’s more than five, you need to cut long words.

Then eyeball your copy and scan for long words. Any word of three syllables or more is a candidate for replacing.

2. Use a better thesaurus.

Substitute shorter words where you can. A thesaurus can help. But don’t use Microsoft Word’s, which seems capable only of identifying longer words as substitutes.

Instead, try Visual Thesaurus, One Look Dictionary’s reverse dictionary or Thsrs (The shorter thesaurus). Enter a long word, like “ironic,” and it gives you a shorter word, like “dry” or “wry.”

3. Write about people doing things.

Think of your sentences as stories with clearly identifiable characters acting concretely, suggests the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Its failure could affect vehicle directional control, particularly during heavy brake application.”

Yes: “You won’t be able to steer when you put on the brakes.”

4. Make subjects characters.

Write about people doing things, not about things doing things, as in this example from the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Our expectation was for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling that management interference with the strike or harassment of picketing workers was not permitted.”

Yes: “We expected the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to rule that management could not interfere with the strike or harass picketing workers.”

5. Turn actions into verbs.

Write in verbs, not nouns, suggests the Little Red Schoolhouse school of readability:

No: “Growth occurred in Pinocchio’s nose when lies were told by him to Geppetto.”

Yes: “Pinocchio’s nose grew longer when he lied to Geppetto.”

Corollary: Nix nominalizations, or words that turn verbs (like explain) into nouns (like explanation).

6. Write to ‘you.’

Look at how writing directly to the reader streamlines syllables and sentences in this passage from the SEC’s “Plain English Handbook” (PDF):

Before — 5.1 characters per word:

This Summary does not purport to be complete and is qualified in its entirety by the more detailed information contained in the Proxy Statement and the Appendices hereto, all of which should be carefully reviewed.

After — 4.6 characters per word:

Because this is a summary, it does not contain all the information that may be important to you. You should read the entire proxy statement and its appendices carefully before you decide how to vote.

7. Write as you speak.

I often say to participants in my workshops, “You would never, ever say this.” Your voice is a good filter for the words you use in your message.

“Good writing is good conversation, only more so.”

― Ernest Hemingway, American author and journalist famous for his economical, understated style

So pass the “Hey! Did you hear?” test.

Say, “Hey! Did you hear?” Then read your message aloud. If it sounds as if your message logically follows those four one-syllable words, your message is crisp and conversational.

If it sounds like a neurological dissertation, make your words shorter and chattier.

8. Choose one-syllable words.

“Short words are best,” said Winston Churchill, “and old words when short are the best of all.”

Take a tip from Churchill — the only person I know of who slayed Nazis with words — and choose one-syllable words.

9. Choose Anglo-Saxon words.

English has two daddies: the Latin daddy, who spoke in long, abstract, fancy words about ideas, and the Anglo-Saxon daddy, who pointed at a rock and grunted, “ROCK!”

Choose from the Anglo-Saxon side of the family.

“After the Normans invaded England, Latin words became preferred by the country’s royalty, clergy and scholars. Latin words were, and still are, more formal and indirect than their dirt cheap Anglo-Saxon equivalents,” writes Bill Luening, senior editor, The Kansas City Star.

“Anglo-Saxon, the honest language of peasants, packs a wallop. In Anglo-Saxon, a man who drinks to excess is not bibulous but a drunk, a man who steals is not a perpetrator, but a thief, and a man who is follically-impaired is not glabrous, but bald. Direct language is powerful language.”

So make it a drunk, bald thief.

10. Don’t find a euphemism for ‘said.’

“Leave said alone,” writes Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar, The Poynter Institute. “Don’t be tempted by the muse of variation to permit characters to opine, elaborate, cajole, or chortle.”

11. Vary your word length.

“Experiment with melody, rhythm and cadence,” write Michelle Hiskey and Lyle Harris, journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Roy Peter Clark agrees. The senior scholar at the Poynter Institute writes:

“Prefer the simple to the technical; put shorter words and paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity. … [R]eaders will remember how the story sounded and resonated in their heads long after they’ve put [your copy] down.”

12. Pack long words with short words.

The problem with most long words isn’t the words themselves, it’s the fact that people who use long words tend to use a lot of them in a row. Break up those multisyllabic pileups with one- and two-syllable words.

13. Put long words in short sentences.

The top two predictors of readability are sentence length and word length. If your words are on the long side, keep your sentences on the short side.

What’s the best word length for blog posts?

When writing articles, blog posts and other social media content, worry less about whether to write a long article or a short one. To increase social shares and other analytics, produce high-quality content — and keep words short.

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When Perceptive Software needed to fill 130 positions — more than one-third of its existing workforce — in just three months, a contradiction in terms was just what the company needed.

Perceptive communicators created a campaign to show that the company — a midsized document management software engineering firm based in Shawnee, Kansas — was hip, hiring and a great place to work.

Shawnee and … hip? For a woman who was raised in this Kansas City suburb, that sounds like an oxymoron. But despite its location, Perceptive is cool, what with its cutting-edge software, Wii “decompression” chambers, on-site dodgeball court and slide from the second to the first floor.

That’s a paradox. So paradox, or oxymoron, became the theme for Perceptive’s campaign.

Contradiction in terms

Oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines two normally contradictory terms — think “deafening silence,” “wise fool” or “cruel kindness.”

The best oxymorons emphasize contrasts, incongruities or the complex nature of reality. “Oxymoron” is Greek for “sharply dull,” so the word is itself an oxymoron.

For nearly 40 years, researchers have been showing that paradoxes in advertising:

• Draw attention to a message and may enhance persuasion
• Give readers a sense of accomplishment and are thus intrinsically rewarding and pleasurable
• Seem “surprisingly true” — and might astonish people into changing their attitudes and beliefs

The Perceptive communicators built their campaign around oxymorons — from the company’s career site URL to its billboards, radio spots and T-shirts. Here’s a sampling of the copy:

The Perceptive communicators were using one of Roy Peter Clark’s top 50 writing tips: Use modifiers to change the meaning of the word, not to intensify it.

“‘Killing Me Softly’? Good adverb,” The Poynter Institute senior scholar writes in Writing Tools. “‘Killing Me Fiercely’? Bad adverb.”

How to write an oxymoron

You can use this approach, too, for your own copy, concept or campaign:

• Determine your key word or phrase. Let’s call it “prima donna.”
• Find contradictory modifiers or verbs via Visual Thesaurus (via RevUpReadership.com), OneLook Reverse Dictionary or your own beautiful brain. “Timid,” maybe.
• Put them together (timid prima donna) and — voila! — you’re off.

The results

It’s one thing to be creative, of course, and another to generate serious business results. Among its successes, Perceptive’s campaign:

• Drew 3,055 résumés via the website — an increase of 408% over the same period the previous year
• Filled 135 positions — five more than the original goal. That was three more during the four-month campaign than the company had filled during the 12 months before the campaign
• Came in at 8% under budget
• Earned lots of buzz from the media, adoration from Perceptive executives and a PRISM award from Kansas City/PRSA

Bottom-line creative. There’s nothing oxymoronic about that.

___

Sources: Jason Stella and Stewart Adam, “Tropes in Advertising: A Web-based Empirical Study,” Southern Cross University, 2005

“Oxymoron,” Wikipedia

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HITS HAPPEN, blares a car insurance company promoting its “accident forgiveness insurance.”

Change a letter, change a word.

How can you add, subtract, move or change letters or syllables to make your copy more creative via wordplay?

1. Add or subtract a syllable.

Smirch was a verb, reports Barbara Wallraff, author of Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words, before William Shakespeare added the prefix be- to it. And impediment was in use for at least 200 years before Shakespeare came up with impede.

How can you add or subtract a syllable to create a new word? Here are four approaches to try:

2. Change a letter.

The Washington Post’s Style Invitational might invite readers to “take any word, add, subtract or alter a single letter, and redefine the word.” Recent responses include:

• Diddleman, a person who adds nothing but time to an effort
• Nominatrix, a spike-heeled woman who controls the selection of candidates for party whip
• Compenisate, to buy a red Porsche for reasons you don’t quite understand

3. Change a letter, then redefine.

The Post also invites readers to add, subtract or change one letter in a word and supply a new definition. Among the top entries:

• Dopeler effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly
• Giraffiti: vandalism spray-painted very high
• Intaxication: euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with
• Reintarnation: coming back to life as a hillbilly
• Sarchasm: the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the reader who doesn’t get it

4. Oui! Change a letter in a foreign word, then redefine.

New York Magazine invited readers to change a single letter in a foreign phrase, then provide a definition. Some of the best new phrases:

• Cogito, eggo sum: I think, therefore I am a waffle.
• Harlez-vous Francais? Can you drive a French motorcycle?
• Mazel ton: tons of good luck
• Quip pro quo: a fast retort
• Veni, vidi, vice: I came, I saw, I partied.

5. Create definitions for groups of things.

In An Exaltation of Larks, James Lipton, now better known as the host of Inside the Actors Studio on Bravo, publishes “venerable terms of venery,” or collective nouns to define a group of objects, such as a pride of lions.

Among the terms Lipton has published:

• a phalanx of flashers (Kurt Vonnegut)
• a mews of cathouses (Neil Simon)
• an om of Buddhists (George Plimpton)

What’s the term of venery for a group of vice presidents? A meeting of your top clients? A conference of communicators?

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