Effective communication is about delivering your message clearly to your desired audience using common language. While this is a simple concept, many marketers often lose sight of this underlying goal and become obsessed with using language that’s fancy but is vague and incomprehensible. Here are 4 writing tips that can help marketers become stronger writers: 

1. Keep it simple, stupid

   Brevity, simplicity, and clarity are the bedrock of effective communication. By using simple language, you can ensure your audience won’t misinterpret, become puzzled, and most importantly, ignore your message. Complicated sentences on the other hand can make your sentences a drag to read. For example:

   Complex: “With the overwhelming rise in gasoline prices in the last 6 months, the government is now attempting to lessen its people’s financial distress by reassessing the country’s public transportation system and cost.”

   Simple: “The government is now finding alternatives to accommodate the gas price increases in the last 6 months.”

   The audience will most definitely comprehend the latter message more clearly

    

2. Keep your sentences short and have one main idea per sentence

   A sentence preferably should have 12 to 18 words or at maximum, 20 words. Anything exceeds that amount can become dreadful for your audience to read. What’s more, it can dilute the clarity of your main message. By keeping your sentences short and concise, you can cut to the chase and explain your idea thoroughly. This in turn allows your audience to easily understand your sentence’s central idea and acknowledge why it matters to them. You can keep your sentences short by removing unnecessary adjectives and adverbs as well as adjusting your sentence’s structure. For instance, instead of saying “Yesterday, there were so many people from all over town at the mall that I was unable to visit the store I wanted to go,” you could say “I didn’t have a chance to visit my favorite yesterday because there were too many people at the mall.”  This depicts how you can remove the non-essentials in your sentence to get your point across effectively.

    

3. Use common vocabulary

   Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon

   As a marketer, your bottom line is to arouse your consumers’ purchase intentions. Undoubtedly, there’s no better way to do that other than using simple vocabulary. Today, marketers take pride in using buzz words such as “capitalize,” “optimal” and “functionality” when they could be using common terms such as “take advantage of,” “best,” and “feature.” By using easy-to-understand terms, you can smoothen your audience’s reading process and make your message sink into their minds seamlessly.

    

4. Place the subject first

   Imagine you’re currently taking a stroll at a nearby park on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and suddenly, a masked man holds a knife at you and tells you to give him your wallet. If this actually happens to you and you cry for help, will you say “Hey! I’m talking a walk right now and someone is trying to mug me!” or “Hey! Someone is mugging me! Help!” Surely, the latter outcry seems like the appropriate and natural thing to do. This urgency to spill out what you want to say is exactly how we should write – have your most crucial idea, or subject, first.  This approach enables you to get to the point quickly and in turn, entice your audience immediately. After all, if you can’t capture your readers’ attention right away, what are the chances of them reading the rest of your content?