Four guidelines for making your writing more succinct

Your writing will be more succinct and you will be more likely to win people over, if you remember the following four guidelines:

• Think about your audience and what you want to achieve. The better you understand them, the more chance you have of communicating successfully.
  
• Delete unnecessary information. Everyone is busy. Your readers do not want to waste time reading stuff from you that they do not need.
  
• Delete unnecessary words. Look at the following sentence and see how many words you can cut. You might improve your writing somewhat if you sometimes try to follow this suggestion.
  
• Replace complex words with simple words. An airline pilot recently referred to the chance of ‘precipitation’. Why would he use that word?

And be sure to avoid things like this:

• 'The consultants recommend integrated asset flexibility.'
• 'Our exploratory research points to global third-generation mobility.'