Condensing your thoughts
Whether writing an executive summary or trying to develop an elevator statement, it’s often much more challenging to make it shorter than longer. If you ever wrote a college term paper restricted to a certain number of pages, you would empathize with this. I have seen executive summaries that run longer than four pages full of information but put me to sleep trying to read it. Why is it so difficult to condense your thoughts, and how do you create a concise message?
Some Tips
There are several things you can think about when writing brief documents. The first thing to think about is the message. Before you start writing:
- Think about what you want to say to your audience.
- Choose the top three things you want to convey.
- Never try to put more than the top three ideas you want to tell your audience.
By choosing these keywords, you have to pick and choose which three are the most important to your message. If you are writing an executive summary, make sure the three things you want to say include your solution (not technology or product), who your customers are, and why your solution works for your customers better than anything else. Your elevator statement should contain three main items: the hook, the main body, and the call to action, as discussed in the previous blog.
Here is a tip on how to make this process easier. Pick a word that represents the idea you want to present. That means you will have to consider a maximum of three words. Then, look at those words to see if a 9-year-old child can understand those words. If not, you are trying to make it way too complicated. Then, take those words and create a single sentence from each word; then, create a paragraph from those sentences. Try to keep each paragraph to three to four sentences.
Once you have that, look at the content to see if the words convey the message you want to present to the audience. Once you have bones of the message, you can add humor, empathy, or philosophy to make the message more entertaining.
Conclusion
Remember, the art of condensing is an art. You need to repeat it many times to be good at it. Start your conversion to a concise message soon.