Beware adverbs, counsels The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark.

Too often, they dilute the meaning of the verb or repeat it: “The building was completely destroyed.”

Instead, of using adverbs to intensify meaning, Clark suggests, use them to change meaning.

“‘Killing Me Softly’?” he writes. “Good adverb. “‘Killing Me Fiercely’? Bad adverb.”

Good modifiers:

Same thing works with adjectives. Use them to change, not intensify, meaning:

“Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him.”

— Michael Chabon, author, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“The combination of a hard-won cynicism, low overhead, an unstintingly shoddy product line, and the American boy’s unassuageable hunger for midget radios, X-ray spectacles, and joy buzzers had enabled Anapol not only to survive the Depression but to keep his two daughters in private school …”

— Michael Chabon, author, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“After the coffee he recrossed the room and remained standing, stooped over the keyboard in his overcoat, while he played with both hands by the exhausted afternoon light the notes as he had written them.”

— Ian McEwan, author, in Amsterdam

‘Gently ransacked’

So, in a recent writing contest, I asked you to show us how it’s done. Two of you took me up on the challenge.

Barbara Scanlan, principal of Scanlan Creative, described Iditarod sled dog teams facing snowless conditions on the Alaska Range:

“The dogs ran along at record speeds, while the sleds, often with brakes and runners worn out, bounced helplessly behind them.”

And Amy Bridges, manager of sales proposals and RFP support for Sabre Travel Network, submitted this entry:

“The conscientious copy editor gently ransacked her confidence with every ‘Track Changes’ slash and smash.”

Barbara, your submission is beautiful. But I can’t resist your topic, Amy. Congratulations, and watch your mailbox for Words on Words, a favorite tome by my late, great copyediting teacher, John Bremner.

And thank you both for playing.

How can you use adverbs to change, not intensify, meaning?

___

Source: Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Little, Brown and Company (September 1, 2006)

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You can’t cram size 10 hips into a size 4 skirt. And you can’t cram too many messages into a single piece. Try either, and the results can get ugly.

Indeed, the more messages you cover in a campaign or communication, the less people will remember. So count the number of messages you’ve crafted. If the total is more than one, you have too many.

Make like The New York Times: Come up with good story ideas that focus on a single point.

1. Start with a single idea.

To find your focus, start with a single idea.

Think of it this way: Like a tree, your piece might branch out in several directions. But you need to build the story on a single idea or trunk. If you find a sapling — a detail or message that doesn’t contribute to that single theme — pull it out.

A topic, obviously, isn’t an idea. “Kansas City” is a topic, not a theme. “PRSA Digital Media Conference” doesn’t make a good brochure headline, because it lacks an angle. Your product name is not an idea.

Build your story on a firmer foundation. What about Kansas City, your conference or your product?

2. Find the core.

What’s the single most important idea that drives your entire company, campaign or communication?

For Southwest Airlines, for example, the core is “We are THE low-fare airline,” write Chip and Dan Heath in their brilliant book, Made to Stick. That single idea drives every decision the company makes, from what to serve for lunch (nothing) to how to load the planes.

Coming up with that one single thing isn’t easy.

“Smart people recognize the value of all the material,” write the Heath brothers.

“They see nuance, multiple perspectives — and because they fully appreciate the complexities of a situation, they’re often tempted to linger there. This tendency to gravitate toward complexity is perpetually at war with the need to prioritize.”

3. Write a message statement.

When it comes to core values, strategies and key messages, less is more.

Southwest Airlines’ message works because it emphasizes just three things: friendly service, speed and frequent direct flights. Most organizations focus on … everything.

One test of a focused message: Does it lend itself to a tagline? If you struggle to write an eight-word message statement, lead or headline, your message is probably too broad.

4. Write ‘single-joke stories.’

The Wall Street Journal’s Barry Newman — who once discussed with a Journal editor whether he could get one-eighth of an inch out of a story — says the key to writing tight is selection.

“When the A-head (the Journal’s famous front-page feature story) went from 1,800 words to 1,200 words, we had to choose different stories,” he says.

In 1,200 words, he says, you can cover “single-joke stories.”

5. Perform message triage.

Political strategist James Carville preaches the gospel of “exclusivity.” That is, to come up with a single message — not two, not three — for your campaign.

Carville famously chose “It’s the economy, stupid,” for Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign. Less famously, he had to talk Clinton out of diluting that message by also talking about eliminating the national debt.

Carville says the communicators’ toughest job is to convince the client to stick to one message or theme.

“People say I fill empty vessels,” he says. “But I empty full vessels.”

6. Keep cutting.

“If you can write a ‘Ten reasons you should …’ headline, you’re only nine subtractions away from an idea,” write the folks at Killian Company Advertising.

7. Keep subtracting.

Adopt GE Reinsurance communicators’ motto:

“Single point, simple message.”

Know what it’s about.

Still having trouble identifying the key idea? Maybe you need to know more, not less, about your topic.

In the movie “Wonder Boys,” Michael Douglas’s character watches the only copy of his novel manuscript blow into the river. A character named Vern asks him what the book was about. Douglas can’t really explain.

“If you didn’t know what it was about,” Vern asks, “why was you writing it?”

____

Sources: Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, 2007

“Communicators kiss Carville,” Ragan Report, Sept. 25, 2000

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Too often, we cut our copy the hard way: a word at a time. If we need to cut 600 words, we peer through our prose until we find a candidate for cutting.

There’s one, we say. There’s one. There’s one.

The rest of our lives later, we’ve cut our copy by 600 words. But now we have a piece that’s, while shorter, flat and lifeless. Elmore Leonard used to famously say:

I like to leave out the parts people skip.

But with compression — polishing your piece a word at a time — we tend to take out the parts people read.

That’s because the first thing to go when you’re cutting a word at a time is the anecdotes. That’ll save 50 words. Then the metaphors. That’s 40.

We want to write pieces that are an inch wide and a mile deep. We want to cover very little ground, but cover it fully. That’s why tightening your story angle is so important. You don’t have room in your blog post to cover a card catalog of information.

So here are three ways to make polishing, or compression, work for you.

1. Avoid the trash compactor story.

At its worst, compression — polishing your piece a word at a time — can lead to a trash compactor story.

“Most writers, when ordered to write short, make the mistake of writing the garbage compactor story, compressing everything in the notebook into a hard, indigestible pellet of news.”

—  Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Writing to Deadline

Don’t squeeze the life out of your piece. Sometimes, compression works about as well as Microsoft Word’s AutoSummarize function. Here’s what happens to, say, the Gettysburg Address when you click AutoSummarize:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Yup, it’s short. But you’ve got to admit, it loses something in translation.

2. Cut first, polish second.

The solution to the trash compactor story? Cut first, polish second.

You don’t want to polish something in half. What if jewelers took polishing cloths to raw stones? That’s not an efficient way to, say, get an emerald cut, and the results would probably be fairly disappointing. But pull out that polishing cloth after you cut the emerald into shape, and now you can make your jewel shiny and bright.

Same thing’s true with polishing your message. Cut first — tightening your story angle and breaking your message up — to get the copy into shape. Then, when you’re about 10% above your word count limit, polish the rest.

The result: tight, bright copy.

3. Edit with a highlighter.

When I conduct writing workshops at Tellabs, I always learn as much as I teach.

One day, watching the Tellabs team edit a press release during a practice session, I was surprised to see George Stenitzer, vice president of corporate communications, wielding a highlighter instead of a pencil. Instead of cutting words, phrases and ideas he wanted to remove from the piece, George was highlighting information he wanted to keep.

It’s a great technique, because it focuses you on finding what you need instead of what you want to scrap. Think of it as Marie Kondo-ing your message: Instead of leaving all of your clothes in your closet and auditioning which should go out, take everything out of your closet and audition each garment to get back into your closet.

Forget Strunk and White: Instead of omitting needless words, identify needed words.

“I use a highlighter to pluck a simple message from a sea of complexity.”

— George Stenitzer, vice president of corporate communications, Tellabs

Having stolen George’s technique, I’ve come to believe that highlighting needed words is more effective than omitting needless words. It gets you there faster.

I think it will work for you, too.

(See how artist Austin Kleon writes with an eraser — or, in his case, a black marker.)

Learn more

Remember, corporate communications writing isn’t academic writing or business writing. Here’s how to handle your:

• Wordy sentences: How to remove every extra word
• Passive sentences: How to turn passive voice into active voice
• Sentence structure: How to write with the fewest words
• Writing process: When to get rid of unnecessary words

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