‘Short, sweet and to the point:’ Writing for maximum efficiency

You don’t need to write the next great novel to be a top-level comms writer. In fact, the shorter and more pointed you are, the better in many cases.

In the first week of Ragan’s Writing Certificate Course September 10, Sherrie Voss Matthews, senior director of communications at Washington University in St. Louis, will share her experiences and perspectives on how comms pros can make their writing more efficient and readable — sometimes with a little extra help from technology.

“You really need to have things short, sweet and to the point to get the message out,” she said.

Voss Matthews shared her experiences communicating about the tornado that ripped through St. Louis earlier this year and caused substantial damage around the city. She said that the situation called for major collaboration efforts between members of the comms team to ensure that every piece of information they shared was accurate and effectively communicated their crisis messaging.

“We edited each other’s items, both to make sure we were on the same messaging point and also to make sure we were distilling it in a way that was understood by our staff,” she said. “Everybody was under high stress.”

She also said that writing in a crisis like the tornado required shorter writing due to the urgency of the situation and the importance of reaching the staff and student population during a natural disaster.

“We worked together to make sure we were accurate and also winnowing down the wordiness and making sure that we were getting the right information to the right people,” she said. “As you can imagine, there are piles of information coming in from all over at different times.”

She added that even while working to keep things short and informative, tone mattered a great deal in her team’s communication about the storm.

“On a lot of that messaging — especially the thank-you stuff that we were working on with staff — I probably rewrote it five or six times in a two-hour period because I wanted to go back and cut out anything that seemed cliché or wordy or just cheesy,” Voss Matthews told Ragan. “At that point, getting tone right was very important.”

AI as a writing assistant

As part of the course, Voss Matthews will share her views on AI use as a way to help communicators make their writing more pointed and efficient. She told Ragan that while using AI tech doesn’t come naturally to her, she’s employed to help her cut down on language that her audience might not fully understand.

“I’m a Luddite and I don’t use it very often,” Voss Matthews said. “But if I’m stuck and I feel like either I can’t boil it down to talking points or it’s super jargony, I will toss it in there sometimes just to see if I can get a prompt that will at least get it to something that I can work with.”

She also said that she’s used AI to help with putting together headlines on already-written content.

“We’ve used it for subject lines, especially if we’re trying to AB test something,” Voss Matthews told Ragan. “We’ll see what we come up with because I am not a headline writer.”

While there’s a lot of potential for AI to help writers make their work more efficient, Voss Matthews cautioned that the work needs to be high-quality to begin with if AI is going to work well.

“This is an assistance tool,” she said. “This is not the magic wand to solve all your problems. “I keep chanting that to my leadership because your computer program, your system or your website is only as good as the data that you put into it.”

Register for Ragan’s Writing Certificate Course here.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.