A friend of mine had a contract to write a business-to-business book. The corporation's managers provided an outline of what they wanted the book to say, and they scheduled conference calls after each chapter.
A straightforward plan.
But after the writer submitted chapter 1 — in which she clearly covered every point the corporation wanted to communicate to its customers — the managers expressed great disappointment:
"We were expecting 30 to 40 pages in chapter 1, and you have submitted only seven."
My friend replied: "You certainly can have 30 to 40 pages, but they will be unreadable, because in order to fill those pages, everything in those original seven pages will have to be repeated several times."
The managers apparently mistook length for value.
The writer tried to explain the value of brevity. Lacking a meeting of minds, the managers and the writer parted ways.
Businesses do well to heed the advice of professional writers — whether in-house or external — to keep communication simple and brief. To make the writing show "you say what you mean," do it economically; you will be doing a great service for your company and for your target audience.