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HomeGuidelines > 1. Trim that Text! ! > 1e. Delete marketing fluff> Challenges                                                              

 

Background

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Audience Fit

Challenges

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Challenges

(1)

Rewrite by focusing on nouns and verbs, in new sentences.

The true market leaders of tomorrow are incredibly agile, with intelligent industry-wide supply chains responding in real time to fast-changing customer demands, with powerful data stores serving widely decentralized staff who are totally empowered to make mission-critical decisions in the field.

41 words

Answer =>

(2)

Rewrite omitting exaggerated or boastful language.

Since its brilliant beginning at a top-rated international laboratory, the World Wide Web, or the graphical and interactive side of the vast and complicated network of networks known as the Internet, has swept the computing world, and indeed, the whole world of business, like a tidal wave. The Web wows end users because it offers such incredibly intuitive technologies as fast and accurate searching, hypertext navigation, and instantaneous connection with information in almost every country in the world.

78 words
Answer =>

(3)

Reduce the puffery.

Recently, our premiere team of world-class scientists and top-rated engineers celebrated the remarkable discovery of the neutrino 40 years ago by Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan while working for the Laboratory. The Reines and Cowan Nobel Prize-winning research on neutrinos was a fantastic demonstration of the incredible synergy of mission-oriented, applied, and basic research. Impressive, too, is the amazing progress made in neutrino physics over the last 40 years. Our researchers have continued to be at the leading edge of this exciting field of science.

85 words

Answer =>

 

Reflecting on Brevity

If you're out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.--Albert Einstein

 

 

Answers

(1)

Market leaders respond. They shift supply chains as customers change their demands. In the field, their staff use data stores to make decisions on the spot.

27 words

 

 

 

(2)

Beginning in a lab, the Web gave us graphics and interaction over the Internet, that network of networks. The Web has changed the way we use computers and do business. Through searches and links, the Web lets us find information from around the world.

44 words

 

 

(3)

Scientists and engineers recently celebrated the discovery of the neutrino, 40 years ago, by Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, of the Lab. Reines and Cowan won a Nobel prize for their research.

The Lab has continued their work on neutrino physics, combining basic, applied, and mission-oriented research.

 

 

 

Other ways to trim that text

1a. Cut any paper-based text by 50%.

1b. Use short words.

1c. Make some sentences short.

1d. Make most paragraphs short.

1f. Move vital but tangential or supplemental material.

1g. Convert repeating categories of information into tables.

1h. Beware of cutting so far that you make the text ambiguous.

Resources on brevity

Taking a Position on Brevity

Heuristic Online Text (HOT) Evaluation for Brevity

Poster

 

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