I am setting forth ten commandments for writers in the public sector, based on my dissertation and on standards for clear writing. The commandments will each appear as a Word of the Week.
Third commandment:
Optimize the length of the text.
Style guides are careful not to give specific rules about the length of a written piece. I avoid that as well. I prefer to talk about optimizing the length. In part, optimizing means you should remove any content and expressions that fail to add value for the reader. A good example of low-value content is repetition, which unfortunately is very typical in official documents.
Deletion isn’t a goal on its own. You shouldn’t remove words and expressions that improve comprehension. An illustrative example can help the reader grasp the main point. Conjunctions (if, when, but) and connectives (therefore, thus, moreover) highlight the relationship between different topics or issues.
Official documents often feature a great deal of citations of policy and legal references. Some writers feel the additional length and density are the proper form for such documents. They want to document their work and so include evidence of their process: research they did, references they consulted, options they considered. The aim is to make visible the entire working process, not its results.
We’d get interesting viewpoints about the length of documents if we asked citizens and policy-makers to say how long they think things like agendas, news releases, and reports should be. For online text, this would be easy to add at the end of each item, “Was the length of this piece too short, about right, or too long?” Another source of data: measuring how long readers spend on a page, as well as the point at which they quit. Many publications now include an estimate for average reading time
All these techniques are tools that the providers of text can use to consider length – and to optimize the reader’s experience.