How do you squeeze a big idea, more than 18 months of research and input from more than 3,000 constituents into a sound bite that expresses the whole purpose of your organization?

The International Association of Business Communicators found out in developing the organization’s new brand tagline. IABC leaders started with this brand positioning statement:

At 60 words, that sentence is a mouthful. So IABC leaders compressed the positioning statement into a brand promise:

At 23 words, this is a mere sliver of the original text. But it’s still not ready for prime time. So leaders condensed that big idea into a brand tagline of just two words:

Be Heard

And, with a maxim as crisp, clear and compelling as that, that’s what IABC is bound to be.

So how can you condense your big idea into a little space? Whether you’re writing a blog post or a bylined article for The New York Times, summarize your idea into:

The back of a business card

As one of my favorite college professors, R.S. Musser, used to say: “If you can’t summarize your story idea on the back of my business card, you don’t have a clear idea.”

A walkaway sentence

What’s the single sentence you want your readers to walk away with after reading your piece? That’s your story angle.

Keep that sentence to eight words or less, because that’s a length people can grasp fully at a glance, according to the American Press Institute.

An elevator pitch

Say your biggest prospect joins you on the elevator in the lobby. As you zoom up to the third floor, what one thing are you going to tell her about your product, service or idea? That’s your focus sentence.

A tweet

Christopher Smith, corporate writing and editing guru, challenges communicators to summarize their articles in 280 characters or less. This practice not only helps writers find their focus but also reveals what information is essential to your message — and what is not.

A bumper sticker or billboard

How’s this for an efficient story angle: “One if by land, two if by sea.” Of course, legend has it that Paul Revere’s famous eight-word call to action launched the American Revolution.

Can your short point drive your readers to act?

Six words

Decades after Ernest Hemingway famously crafted a six-word story — “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” — to settle a bet, the six-word story format has taken off.

• SMITH Magazine calls for six-word memoirs.
• The Harvard Business Review suggests summing up your leadership style in six words.
• Sixwordstories.net is dedicated to publishing prose in six words. (Some are almost unbearably compelling: “Family’s tears hurt more than chemo.”)

A classified

Seth Godin, marketing guru and author of The Practice, suggests that you write a classified.

“What’s the offer?” he asks. “What do you want me to do? You’re paying by the word!” Because attention is expensive.

Maybe, he says, you’ll write something like:

Lose weight now. Join our gym.

“Six words,” says Godin. “Promise and offer.”

A slogan

Advertising Age’s “Top 10 Slogans of the 20th Century” all weighed in at five words or less:

• Diamonds are forever (DeBeers)
• Just do it (Nike)
• The pause that refreshes (Coca-Cola)
• Tastes great, less filling (Miller Lite)
• We try harder (Avis)
• Good to the last drop (Maxwell House)
• Breakfast of champions (Wheaties)
• Does she … or doesn’t she? (Clairol)
• When it rains it pours (Morton Salt)
• Where’s the beef? (Wendy’s)

Can you summarize your story angle into five words or less? If so, you’ve got a story angle.

Now use your summary sentence.

Your summary sentence will keep you from getting scattered. It will tell you what to put in — and what to leave out of — your copy.

____

Sources: “The IABC Brand: Briefing for IABC Chapters,” International Association of Business Communicators, January 2007

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The best way to make your sentences tighter and easier to understand is to simplify them. That is, write mostly simple sentences.

Allow me to channel your fifth-grade English teacher for a moment to remind you that a simple sentence uses a subject-verb-object sentence structure:

Subject > Verb > Object

We won the game.

It contains one independent clause and no dependent clauses.

Types of sentence structures

As you move up the ladder of complexity, you reach compound and complex sentences — sentences with dependent and independent clauses glued together with conjunctions and punctuation.

This is where your fifth-grade teacher yammered:

Blah blah blah compound verbs blah blah blah blah compound subjects blah blah basic sentences blah blah blah subordinate clauses blah blah only have one subject blah blah blah blah expresses a complete thought blah blah types of simple sentences blah blah blah

Let’s skip all that, shall we? Instead, let’s turn to Al Borowski, president of Priority Communication Skills Inc., who delivers my favorite reminder of the types of sentences structures:

This is a simple sentence.

This is a compound sentence; it contains two independent clauses.

This is a complex sentence that contains one dependent clause and one independent clause.

This is a compound-complex sentence, and because it contains two independent clauses and a dependent clause, it becomes a long sentence.

Here are four ways to simplify your sentences:

1. Get to the verb faster.

Quick! Where’s your verb?

It should be near the front of your sentence, right after your subject. But here, the verb doesn’t show up until 28 words in:

Don’t bury your verb under a long parenthetical phrase (let alone your whole boilerplate). Remember: You can always explain what your company is the leading provider of in a separate sentence.

2. Write ‘low-depth’ sentences.

That’s an example of a high-depth sentence. Depth refers to the number of words before the verb in a sentence. High-depth sentences are harder to understand than low-depth sentences, found readability expert G. R. Klare in a 1976 review of 36 readability studies. The deeper the sentence — the more words before the verb — the lower the comprehension.

Twenty-two words, for instance, delay the verb in this sentence:

3. Force the verb to the front.

Here’s a quick trick for forcing the verb toward the front of the sentence from Joseph M. Williams, author of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace:

“Run a line under the first five or six words of every sentence. If you find that (1) you have to go more than six or seven words into a sentence to get past the subject to the verb and (2) the subject of the sentence is not one of your characters, take a hard look at that.”

Great advice.

4. Lean to the left.

Here’s a trick for making even the longest sentence easier to read and understand: Write “right-branching” sentences. A right-branching sentence starts with the subject and verb, branching off into subordinate elements on the right.

“If meaning is created by subject and verb, then a sentence that begins with subject and verb MAKES MEANING EARLY,” writes Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at The Poynter Institute’s and author of Writing Tools.

And that makes it easier to understand.

Once you’ve established meaning at the beginning — the “left side” — of the sentence, you can branch out on the right side with “almost limitless clauses” and still remain understandable, Clark counsels.

Here’s how it works, using a sentence from J.D. Salinger’s 1945 Esquire short story, “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise”:

That’s a 30-word sentence. Under normal circumstances, it would achieve less than 50 percent comprehension, according to American Press Institute research. Yet it’s perfectly understandable. That’s because it makes meaning on the left and branches out on the right.

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