Do you remember all those dreaded papers in high school and college—the ones that required 2,000 words on topics so dull you convinced yourself there was absolutely no way you would ever manage to conjure up the required word count (let alone write that many words worthy of an A)?

As a communicator in real life, I find those old paper assignments incredibly ironic. While long-form writing is appropriate on certain platforms these days, it’s a waste of time (and a detriment) when it comes to communications.

The challenge? It’s harder to write less than it is to write more.

By that I mean this: It’s more challenging to condense a lot of important information into an email with as little copy as possible than it is to write out everything you’d like to say, in the way you’d like to say it.

It requires you to be more concise, more succinct. It forces you to cut the fluff and reduce words down to the essentials. It makes you determine what is most important and where in the communication that needs to live to get the most attention.

And I’ll be the first to admit it: It’s hard.

Here are three things I’ve found to be incredibly helpful in this process of moving from short novel to short and sweet:

1️⃣ Identify the 1-2 things in your email that you’d want people to catch even if they don’t read anything else, and then put those centerstage. In other words, assume people are skimming your communications as though they’re on social media (because honestly, they might be). Pull those 1-2 most important things to the very top of your email and make them the stars of the show. If you have certain details you really need people to catch, bold the copy, italicize, make the font a different color, highlight the text, etc. Make those details hard to miss if they’re skimming.

2️⃣ Be your own copyeditor several times over. Read your communication, give yourself at least five minutes away from it, then come back and cut a sentence. Read through it again and trim a few more sentences. If you have time, come back later that day and find other words to cut. (Go ahead, be ruthless!) While you want to avoid coming across as dry or too direct, most of the time we can afford to condense copy and still keep that personal brand flair.

3️⃣ When communicating a lot of information or details, format to break up your email. No one wants a newspaper article delivered to their inbox. Important details get lost, and people often get bored or overwhelmed and move on to the next thing. Use line breaks, section blocks, or whatever formatting works within your brand’s VIS (visual identity standards) to make a lot of information easier to digest to your readers. 

And in the essence of brevity, I’ll leave it there.