Too Little/Too Much

Driving up across on the Pennsylvania Turnpike yesterday, I spotted an odd billboard. The name of the business in large letters, then a photograph, and in much smaller letters:

Denial Center

Eh?

As I drove closer, my brain began to assemble the information into something more coherent. The two people in the photo had bright, wide smiles. The "i" was actually a "t." Not a Denial Center at all: a Dental Center.

It reminded me of a photo my friend Joan Garry snapped on a recent trip to Greensboro, North Carolina.

You would have no idea what goes on in this office...unless you already knew what goes on in this office. (And in that case, you wouldn't need the sign.)

The billboard in Pennsylvania offers too little information; the shop window in North Carolina too much—and none of it particularly helpful.

Business communications can easily veer between these extremes, too.

Do you speak in shorthand? Don't assume the reader or listener has the same amount of information you do. You don't have to rehash the entire history of a project, but specific details—maybe about why you made key choices—make your story memorable. Yes, it's great that doctor has a Dental Center. But we can get clean teeth almost anywhere; why should we go there?

Alternatively, do you bury your main message in layers of extraneous information? The only word in that window that relates in any way to the business conducted here is "floss." Yes, it's another Denial Dental office.

Sing? Dance? Travel? How could these words possibly convince me to entrust my teeth to the doctor in residence? I suppose you could make a case for using them in the context of a longer piece—a speech or an article—but here they add nothing to the reader's understanding. A complete waste of marketing space.

These dentists need to find the "just right"—the Goldilocks option. Any suggestions?

Write as if it's going to be read

Someone famously said there are two things no one should see being made: laws and sausages.

I would add a third item to that list—corporate reports: year-end round-ups, annual reports, board reports. Writing expected to embody an enterprise-wide viewpoint can generally be counted on to say too much about everything and not nearly enough about something—any one thing that sums up the organization's purpose or goal. These mega-reports are never written as much as they are extruded like the aforementioned sausages—information mashed together without an overarching message and expelled into the required format.

As an expert advisor to nonprofits, my friend Joan Garry has read (or struggled to read) her fair share of these things. She summed up her advice in this blog post. Joan advises carefully crafting the Executive Director's report as if it's the only part of the tome that will be read.

And if you want to keep your readers turning the pages after they finish the ED's report, I suggest you open each subsequent section with a story that captures the real-world impact of the organization's work. Nonprofits probably have an easier time finding stories that tug at the heartstrings, but every organization can find compelling stories of people who went above and beyond, grateful clients, lives positively impacted.

Tell those stories and your readers will stick around to the very last page.