8 muddled corporate statements rewritten for clarity

I disagreed. But, I figured I should back up that assertion with examples drawn from real life.

Recently, I trawled real corporate press releases and quickly found several examples that crossed my eyes and muddled my brain. (And I spent more than a decade as a financial journalist.)

Below, I’ve reprinted snippets from eight of those media releases. In each case, I rewrote the wordy phrases and trimmed the jargon and extra stuff. I used active verbs and shorter sentences. Each example is different, but the concept is the same.

The idea is to show how to strip away unneeded or fuzzy words and distill meaning. This isn’t relevant only for PR professionals. This habit is essential for bloggers or others who want people to share their posts, buy their services or products, or do something else they urge. In today’s economy, that’s pretty much all of us.

If our audience has to spend much time figuring out what we mean, they will move on and we will lose out. Why make it hard for them? That’s what the eight press releases had in common: It was harder than it should have been to get the message. Great content is easy to read.

Sentences from real press releases

In these eight examples, the original phrasing from the release appears first; my rewrite immediately follows.