How to write badly (2): Think creatively about redundancies

We continue our series on writing badly, which started with minimal hyperbole a few days ago.

Marketing writers often think that the more they repeat their message, the better the impact. Often, they are also afraid of leaving anything unsaid—a reader might harbor doubts or even miss the point entirely, so it’s best to approach it from different angles. Distracted audiences might not even pay attention the first time they hear something, but maybe they’ll do better the second or third time. Apply this principle to writing content, and it will help you fill screens and pages quickly and result in the sort of labored prose that is a hallmark of accomplished bad-writing style. Thus: Recommended. If you want to stay within the healthy parameters of accepted writing behaviors and avoid surprising readers, you need to build redundancies into your copy.

As a bad writer, you need to guard carefully against your natural inclination to avoid redundancies.

Get creative in what you think of as repetitions and redundancies. You need to be bit subtle about it, or your readers will catch on to what you’re doing and think it’s some kind of gullibility or perseverance test. You need to keep your redundancies varied, or the audience will drift away. As you practice, start by creating redundancy within a sentence, using two or three similar expressions when one would suffice, be enough, or make your point. At the next stage, which requires a little more effort, you can elegantly repeat the content of entire sentences. Going beyond single words and short phrases, entertain your audience by rephrasing certain statements.

If you want to take redundancy to a higher level, you need to do a little planning. Have you seen those white papers in which the executive summary, introduction, and conclusion are alike except for some turns of phrase? That takes work. Or, consider case studies. Many times, a case study or success story introduces certain issues an organization experienced. Then, the writer tells you how the company used a product or service to address these issues, which can be happily recapitulated at that point. Finally, a concluding section presents what changed, giving room to restate the issues a third time. Even better, supporting quotes can echo the narrative with comparable redundancies. Customer evidence is practically the Holy Grail for writers who are dedicated to the pursuit of redundancy. I know some people are trying to move away from the gold standard, but many case study writers and their readers proudly and passively lag behind. You don’t want to go out on a limb, straying from the norm.

If your boss or client still has budget left to spend on your contributions, you can dream up entire deliverables that are completely redundant. Don’t try it with case studies—it’s too darn obvious when one company starts sounding like another. I’ve seen this done very well with white papers, where the risk of somebody reading more than one is low in any case. Also, with fact sheets, easy to knock off and quickly repeated for other offerings. A tip: If you want to test whether people actually read your materials, insert some completely off-the-wall content near the end and see if anybody comments. If they stay quiet, you’re free to repeat whatever you like, as long as you like.

Redundancy, already bad in itself in most writing unless it’s an opera libretto, can be worse if you apply yourself. Stay tuned as we explore complementary techniques. Mistakes will be made, again.