In business writing, less is more

There’s a big difference between how much you’d like to say (a lot), and what your reader is likely to remember (much less)

Imagine that you have to write a short description of Amazon for a person who’s been stuck on a desert island for the past 20 years. You might come up with something like this:

Or you could go for this shorter version:

Which do you think the islander is more likely to remember?

In business writing, people often fall into the trap of saying too much, thereby forgetting that readers can only absorb so much information before feeling overwhelmed.

People rarely need to be fully informed to take action; they only need to be reasonably informed. So it’s important to get to the point and say it in the first three lines.