Be Concise

Enhance user engagement and retention through better readability by keeping your content short and specific.

To keep content understandable, concise, and relevant, it should be:

• Specific,
• Informative,
• Clear and concise,
• Brisk but not terse,
• Incisive (friendliness can lead to a lack of precision and unnecessary words) but human (not something generated by a faceless machine), and
• Serious but not pompous or emotionless: adjectives can be subjective and make the text sound more emotive and like spin.

You should:

• Use contractions (such as can’t and won’t),
• Not let caveats dictate unwieldy grammar (for example, say You can rather than You may be able to),
• Use the language people are using,
• Use Google Trends to check for common search terms,
• Use short sentences, and
• Check sentences with more than 25 words to see if you can split them for clarity.

Words ending in –ion and -ment tend to make sentences longer and more complicated than necessary. Avoid turning verbs into nouns, a common sign of governmentese at work.