Have you ever listened to someone who didn’t know when to stop talking? I frequently find myself realizing with fear and a tightening stomach that the person I’m listening to is no longer speaking to me but at me.

My muscles start to tense, and I look for an exit — any exit — as they drag me down side trails and force feed me extraneous detail about what they were wearing when something happened and what the situation reminded them of.

Now think of the inverse experience. Have you ever heard a speaker say something wildly intriguing and then stop? At a recent party, a friend of mine nonchalantly mentioned, “I once hugged a shark.”

The whole crowd shut up and leaned in to hear more. “Well, go on,” someone finally said for everyone.

It wasn’t until I learned more about both writing and marketing that I learned I’m not alone in that experience. Particularly in the age of information, we are overloaded with content constantly.

In the book, The 3-Minute Rule, marketing expert Brant Pinvidic explains that for the last 20 years, our attention spans have been steadily decreasing. Rather than this being evidence that we are all “dumbed-down, mindless, distracted zombies,” he explains that people are able to process information more efficiently than we have been in the past — much thanks to constant advertising challenging us to instantly separate wheat from chaff.

As marketing professionals and writers, we can capitalize on this phenomenon by compressing our messages into powerful springs that bounce off the page for our readers and leave them asking for more (not begging for less).

Most writers are familiar with the phrase, “Murder your darlings.” The phrase has been attributed to many writers, but the provenance is irrelevant; the message is the same. Writers must know when to cut even the most beloved pieces of our writing to serve the overall story we want to tell.

Literary compression works in two ways.

Compress Your Message

Flooding readers and potential buyers with extraneous detail and information drowns your gems. When I first started writing Quality Control Plans for clients, it took me nine pages to explain all the different elements and inspections categories and features to “sell” their strategies.

After about 20 such plans, I realized that almost all of them are the same. Meaning, they are all comprised of inspections systems and acceptable quality levels and standard elements, so readers didn’t need to know that my clients’ plans had these, too.

What readers did need to know was the differentiators. Did this client have relevant third-party certifications like ISO or ISSA? Did they use a cutting-edge realtime software? Did they do something different or particularly effective that stood out?

By including only my clients’ differentiators, I was able to start writing one- and two-page Quality Control Plans that, amazingly, starting selling.

Granted, there are times to include granular detail. But even then, we can compress our essential message into a spring that packs a punch at the start to engage readers for the rest… or at least to deliver the tight marketing message before they lose interest and start scanning through the remaining narrative.

Compress Your Sentences

Now bring this concept to each sentence.

Compressing sentences means cutting bulky, useless phrases not doing any work for your message to create space for targeted meaning.

Take this sentence as an example.

The legal landscape in New Jersey necessitates that residents use a strict set of criteria to determine whether they have a personal injury case or not.

The sentence is boring; it’s drowning in needless words. So we start the compression process by cutting the words that are most obviously needless.

The legal landscape in New Jersey necessitates that residents use a strict set of criteria to determine whether they have a personal injury case or not.

Looking more closely at the sentence, we can assume the writer intends to tell us that New Jersey legislation and case law dictate a strict set of rules — perhaps stricter than other states — determining what qualifies as a potential civil lawsuit for personal injury.

The focus of the sentence could then more effectively be on the unique strict criteria rather than on the residents. In fact, the residents are doing little-to-no work and may even mislead readers to believe that they must be a New Jersey resident for these criteria to apply. If we remove the phrasing about residents, there is no longer anyone to do the determining, so we can compress the language into something more powerful.

The legal landscape in New Jersey law necessitates residents use dictates a strict set of criteria for personal injury cases.

We can continue this iterative process indefinitely.

Personal injury cases have strict criteria in New Jersey.

And so on.

This compressed sentence not only packs a punch when it springs forward but also guides readers’ attention exactly where the writer meant for it to go.

Ask yourself, “What work is this sentence supposed to do?” And cut every word that isn’t pulling its weight.

For further information on writing with compression, readers can explore Richard Lanham’s “Paramedic Method.”