Boost Your Word Efficiency for Earth Month

Although environmental initiatives have most of us recycling when possible, turning off the lights when we leave a room and switching to LEDs, words still get carelessly tossed around at an astonishing rate. They don’t grow on trees, people.

A curious thing happens when you use fewer words: the ones you do use work harder for you.

For example, see what happens when I trim unnecessary words from my first sentence:

Environmental initiatives have us recycling, turning off lights and switching to LEDs, but words get tossed around carelessly.

It’s clear, direct, efficient — and we conserved a whopping 15 words. Efficient sentences have a little extra zip.

So why is word waste so common?

Often, words are wasted because people:

Write how they talk.

And when people talk, they tend to, you know, add a few extra words in a lot of the time, because they’re also trying to, like, organize their thoughts as they go at the same time.

Conserve: Once you’ve completed your copy, review it. Keep an eye out for extra words and delete them. When in doubt, ask yourself, “Would this sentence have the same meaning without this word?”

Hide in their words.

Much like a security blanket, diluting our communication can make us feel safer. This could be an attempt to avoid sounding too aggressive or to make a mistake (yours or someone else’s) sound not as bad as it is, among other things.

Conserve: Own your words. If you find yourself diluting a statement with unnecessary words, stop and ask yourself why. There’s often a reason behind it that has nothing to do with linguistics. Padding communication doesn’t address this problem; it only obscures your message, which could even lead to bigger problems. Tackle the issue with thoughtful, clear writing instead.

Don’t know their key point.

Every piece of writing has a focus. Elaboration beyond that focus should support it. This is hard to do if you’re not sure what the focus is.

Conserve: Take a step back. Whether you are conscious of it or not, there is an underlying message in there. If you had to convey your point in one sentence, how would you say it? Ta-da, there’s your focus.

A word to the wise: another reason conserving your words is so important is that they are not recyclable. Reused words lose their meaning over time — just take a look at any end-of-year banned words list. Overeager attempts to recycle these words instead of finding fresh ones are almost always what landed them there.