Word economy refers to how economical you are with your words, or in other words, how many more words do you use than you actually need to convey your message and point clearly and effectively?

Word Economy

Being overly verbose creates an adverse effect; particularly when it comes to creating copy. If you are writing for anything you certainly don’t ever want to write more than it takes to convey your point. The more you write, the more likely you chances are to lose the attention of whomever is reading and subsequently the more likely you are to fail to convert whatever your goal is. As Ernest Borgnine said in “Baseketball”, “people today have attention spans that can only be measured in nanoseconds.”

There are a number of effective ways to work on improving your word economy. For instance, Twitter forces us to be economical with our words by capping every tweet you can make with 140 characters. This forces you in the moment to find a more direct way of conveying the same message and point which you want to make in far fewer words. I covered this in my post on how Twitter improves your copy so ultimately it’s just a great way to refine you skills in saying only what is necessary and not another syllable more than you have to.

Forum signatures also force us to be economical with our words, arguably even more so than simply with Twitter. Here you are writing with the intent of getting people to click through to your signature. Your significant admittedly works in tandem with your post because the more insightful your post the more likely your reader will first read your signature and secondly think more seriously about clicking through it.

A good exercise to specifically work on your word economy is to take a look at an existing sales letter and make note of and eliminate any words which you can legitimately take away without losing or changing the point of what you are trying to say. If you can take those words away, more than likely you are better off without them and they are simply deterring and taking away from your message.

Work on finding alternative but shorter and more direct ways of saying the same thing and rely on adding more points, support, evidence, testimonials, and other types of media to convert on your goal as opposed to just more copy.

I’ll leave you with that Ernest Borgnine clip as it gets me every time: