What 15 years of copywriting taught me about saying less

I've been writing for a living for more than 15 years. Websites, proposals, reports, ads, emails and the occasional carefully worded apology to a client. If I had to boil all of it down to one lesson, it's this: The best copy almost always says less than you think it should.

That sounds obvious, but it isn't. Every brief I've ever received came with an invisible second brief stapled to it, the one where each stakeholder quietly adds the thing they care about. Product wants the feature list, legal the caveat, sales the proof point and the CEO that one phrase from the offsite. Nobody's wrong, exactly. But put all of it on one page, and you've built something nobody is going to read.

Your reader is busy. Act like it.

Here's what nobody says out loud in the kickoff meeting: Your audience doesn't care about this as much as you do. They're skimming between meetings, on their phone, with half their attention somewhere else. They'll give you a few seconds to prove you're worth more of their time, and that's it.

At Meta, the question I kept coming back to was almost embarrassingly simple: What does a busy business owner need to do next? If a page couldn't answer that quickly, it didn't matter how accurate or thorough it was. It wasn't working.

Cutting is the actual job

People think the work of writing is writing. It's mostly cutting.

My first drafts are long. Everyone's are. The real work happens on the second and third passes, when I go line by line and ask whether each sentence has earned its spot. If it hasn't, it goes, even if it's clever. Especially if it's clever and doesn't actually do anything.

These are the questions I ask on every edit, mine or anyone else's:

• Would the reader miss this if it disappeared?
• Am I saying this because it helps them, or because it makes us feel thorough?
• Did I already say this somewhere else on the page?
• Is there a shorter, plainer word that means the same thing?

“Short copy with nothing in it isn't concise. It's just short.”

Less doesn't mean vague

"Say less" gets misread a lot, so let me be clear. It doesn't mean vague or cute. The goal isn't fewer words for their own sake. It's fewer words with more in them.

Specific beats general every single time. "Raised close rates by up to 22%" says more in six words than a whole paragraph about "driving meaningful business outcomes." When I was writing proposals at XPO, the ones that won weren't the longest. They were the ones that spoke directly to the prospect's industry and problem and skipped everything else.

Saying no is part of the craft

Honestly, the hardest part of saying less usually isn't the writing. It's the conversation. Somebody has to tell the room that the fourth bullet point is dragging down the first three, and a lot of the time that somebody is me. I've made my peace with it.

What helps is giving people a reason grounded in the reader instead of in my taste. "I don't like it" starts an argument. "Our reader won't make it this far" usually ends one.

Short takes longer

There's an old line, usually credited to Blaise Pascal, about writing a long letter because there wasn't time to write a short one. Every copywriter knows the feeling. The long version is fast. The short version takes thinking.

That's worth remembering when you plan the work. If a team gives itself two days to write a homepage, most of that time should go to figuring out what not to say. The drafting is the quick part. Deciding what matters, and having the confidence to cut the rest, is where the hours go.

It also changes how I review my team's work. A tight draft that took a day is often a better sign than a long one that took an hour. The effort shows up as fewer words, each one doing more.

The short version

Know who you're talking to. Figure out the one thing they need from you. Say it plainly, prove it fast and cut the rest. Then go back and cut a little more.

Everything else is decoration.