Business Blogging’s Brevity/Detail Tradeoff

“A trade-off exists between brevity and detail,” Brandon Royal explains in the Little Red Writing Book. Sufficient detail will make a piece of writing longer, he adds, but “examples and details are the very things people remember long after reading a piece.” Specific, descriptive words, he advises, make for more forceful writing.

Specific and descriptive wording makes for more powerful business blog content writing, too. As a corporate blogging trainer, that’s something I need to stress to beginner bloggers. Corporate websites provide basic information about a company’s products or a professional’s services, but the business blog content is there to attach a “face” and lend a “voice” to that information by filling in the finer details. And it’s those very details, more than any list of professional credentials or corporate accomplishments, which end up winning the hearts of online readers.

So, what about keeping SEO marketing blog posts short? Each post, I teach, should contain a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of the business or practice. After all, readers come online searching for information, products, or services, and they are not going to take the time to read the full text of even a relatively short blog post) without assurance that they’ve come to the right place. That’s why I teach new freelance blog writers in Indianapolis to address readers’ “What’s-In-It-For-Me?” questions at the beginning, rather than later on in each post.

That’s precisely where the tradeoff between brevity and detail comes in. We need “close-ups” for emotional connection and impact, and our challenge is that “close-ups” use up more words. Brandon Royal suggests a compromise that can be very useful for business owners’ and professional practitioners’ blogs: Keeping individual sentences short helps us in the brevity department, while adding other, short sentences to fill in the details helps with emotional impact.

Short, but not terse, brief, yet filled with impactful detail. Whoever said effective blog content writing was going to be an easy task?