Economy of Words

Thank you for taking the time to visit my site and listen to this podcast. I hope this is informative and enjoyable.

For this first Podcast, I have chosen to discuss the Economy of words, what it means, and how to apply it to your everyday communication. In today’s world of electronic communication, it is even more important to be clear with your message and intent. The use of the internet for everyday communication has made it easy to have your words carried to a broader audience than ever before. This can be both a positive and a negative for your personal branding.

Allen Wastler of CNBC discussed in an article “The Economy of Words and the Internet” (Wastler, 2012) how “Paper based media would guard against rambling length because the paper media costs money. Usually you see the length problem on the Internet, especially in blogs where there is one writer and no editor”.

To be able to effectively represent your personal brand, you must apply the practice of economy of words to your communications. “Economy of words” means keeping your writing simple and to the point. Removing all repetitive and unnecessary descriptions like those that are encouraged in 10^th grade English class.

As mentioned in Dina Giolitto’s article “Economy of Words vs. Clunky Writing” on wordfeeder.com (Giolitto), “The biggest offenders that clunk up your writing include:

Passive verbs; Unnecessary strings of prepositional phrases; Run-on sentences; Repeated words in close proximity (exception: when the repeated word is part of a logical sequence); and Repeated ideas within the same paragraph”

Passive verbs weaken your writing and should be replaced with active verbs. An example of this would be the following:

Clunky "There is some evidence that"

Better: "Evidence shows"

As an example of “economy of words” in use is discussed in an article by Coturnix (Coturnix, 2010). The author discusses the trend of tweets that were done to summarize research papers in 140 characters or less and makes the argument that it is easier to summarize “well-known classical papers compared to those tweeting their own (thus obscure) publications.”

In an article in the New Sales Economy Blog (Levitt), the author  suggests that by using some of the most commonly tweeted words and phrases that you can make your Tweets go further and faster. Some of these are:

1.) You
2.) Twitter
3.) Please
4.) Retweet
5.) Post
6.) Blog
7.) Social
8.) Free
9.) Media
10.) Help
11.) Please ReTweet
12.) Great
13.) Social Media
14.) 10
15.) Follow
16.) How to
17.) Top
18.) Blog Post
19.) Check Out
20.) New Blog Post

This list was originally researched and compiled by @DanZarrella Inbound Marketing Manager at Hubspot.

For more information on this topic and other related items, be sure to check out my blog at camptownadventures.blogspot.com, follow me on Twitter @AmyCampKaplan, find me on Facebook as Amy Camp-Kaplan or e-mail me directly at amycamp@student.kaplan.edu.

Listen to Podcast here:
http://amycampkaplan.podbean.com/