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CONTENT

Keep bullets short and punchy.

Group them together in logical clumps.

Don’t overuse them.

It’s best to mix bullet points with paragraphs to break up content and keep the eye moving.

This also avoids feeling too much like PowerPoint. Also, be careful that your bullets—

which are intended to abbreviate and highlight key messages—do not obfuscate your 2

message. It is entirely too easy to truncate a complete thought so much that it becomes

meaningless to your readers.

Reading level

Most television sitcoms are written at an eighth-grade reading level to appeal to the widest

audience possible. News and editorial programs might be written for a more educated

audience, but I would bet that if you sat a class of 13-year-olds in front of the TV, they

would understand almost every word on CNN. Television is written by professionals who

know how to speak to a broad demographic in a common language. It would be wise for

companies to follow TV’s lead. It’s common to assume your audience is more educated

than they really are, but even if that’s true, people don’t want to think too hard when

reading, especially on the Web, where the term reading is used loosely.

Examples of clarification

Taking into consideration everything covered up to this point in the chapter, let’s take

another look at the examples of the thick corporate speak referenced earlier, and see if we

can’t increase the signal-to-noise ratio to get a clearer meaning. Here is the first one:

Example 1: “Although our software can be premises-based or deployed as a fully hosted

solution, we allow companies to automate and streamline processes, progress organiza-

tional efficiency, and concentrate on governance and compliance through the direct man-

agement and explicit control of content.”

This is not bad copywriting per se, it’s just heavy-handed. It’s technically correct, but the

cacophony of big words wearies the brain. Here is the same message, but with lighter, sim-

plified text:

Example 1 (edited): “Our software introduces new ways to organize your corporation’s

many kinds of content, increasing employee efficiency and helping to meet compliance