The picture to the left shows the many posters we’re required by federal, state and local government to display in our little office. If you’ve already fallen asleep, I can’t blame you. Have you ever seen anything more boring or less reader-friendly?We’ve posted them in the closet because, frankly, they’re an eyesore. More importantly, they’re absolutely ineffective at their apparent objective, which is to help protect employees by educating them on their rights.Why is it so hard to live by the simple rule, “less is more”? When your mission is education, overindulging in words is always a bad idea and can backfire quickly. How many employees have the time to read these posters? And if they do read them, how much information are they able to retain?As professional communicators, our role is to take complex ideas and translate them into a compelling story. This means making the conscious choice to keep our communications as short and simple as possible. If you’re trying to convey more than a few ideas in one communication, you probably need to rethink your approach.Keeping it short and simple means a few things:

• Include only the most relevant information – leave out the extra details, or if you must include them, add them at the end so that reading them is optional.
• Skip the big words. You won’t impress people with how smart you are, but you may convince them to stop reading. Take some advice from one of my favorite authors, Ernest Hemingway: “Poor (William) Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the $10 words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
• Eliminate unnecessary words. We like to think of this as the Twitter rule. When you’re tweeting, you're strictly limited to 140 characters, which forces you to think carefully about the most important words and phrases to include. You can take a similar approach in other communications by avoiding words and phrases that are redundant. For example, “In my personal opinion” is redundant. Opinions are always personal!
• Remember the 3-30-3 rule. You have three seconds to draw a reader in, and if they’re interested, they’ll keep reading for another 30 seconds. If they’re still with you, you’ve got their attention for another three minutes. So make those first 33 seconds count! They might be all you get.