Taking out the fluff
Fluff has its place. Kittens, down comforters, meringue desserts. But it’s a readability-killer when it creeps into your writing. I don’t know whether Writing Fluff is taught in business schools or whether it’s something Marketing majors learn on the street. Either way, there’s too much of it out there.
So what—you ask—is fluff in writing? Anything that adds unnecessary volume without adding meaning. Adjectives, adverbs, gerunds, prepositional phrases, run-on sentences. In a misguided attempt to say everything, fluff writers succeed only in obscuring the message they’re trying to convey.
Much marketing copy reads as if four people sat around a table and collaborated on a pitch. The goal was to say everything they could think of about the product in one sentence. One by one, each person contributed a word or a thought until the sentence reached the optimum level of fluffiness. Here is an actual example from ABC company (not its real name), where I once worked:
Only ABC provides an approach that uniquely brings information, processes and people together in a dynamic case-based application that leverages ABC’s unique strength in analytics to help optimize case outcomes, while leveraging the broadest ecosystem of available business-ready solutions and richest portfolio of enterprise software capabilities.
I can just hear them asking, “Did we say unique enough?” and “How about optimize, leverage, and ecosystem?” “Wait! We forgot dynamic and solutions!” Meanwhile, if you made it to the end of this convoluted sentence, chances are you lost track of what they’re selling. (Hint: It’s case management software.)
It can be fun to create a fluff-filled sentence as an exercise, as long as you don’t try to use it on the public. Here’s a fictitious horrible example. Can you guess what business it is?
Only XYZ provides a dazzling array of wonderfully diverse herbaceous comestibles including salubrious tubers, rhizomes, and legumes, but not to the exclusion of salutary tree-bearing seed-associated structures in a variety of species utilizing all the processes of modern agribusiness to the exclusion of irresponsible application of biocides, nematicides, and other pathogens which may or may not affect the overall level of functional or metabolic efficiency of living organisms.
Answer: Organic fruit and vegetable stand.
Makes your mouth water, doesn’t it?
Like TextCPR on Facebook!
