A cluttered mess of words

"Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon."

William Zinsser wrote that in 1976, but most B2B marketing teams never saw it.

Open any B2B website. Read the homepage. Read the product pages.

Take your time.

Now ask yourself: What do they actually do?

"We leverage AI-powered, human-led, customer-centric solutions to drive transformational outcomes across the enterprise."

The people who wrote it know it says nothing, but they shipped it anyway, because jargon feels safe.

It sounds smart. It's performative competence without requiring any.

B2B writing is bloated because we've convinced ourselves that more words signal more rigor. That hedging signals intelligence. That a sentence no one can argue with is better than a sentence that actually means something.

It isn't.

Every filler phrase is a small act of theft. "In order to" steals two words from "to." "Due to the fact that" steals five words from "because." "At this point in time" steals four words from "now." Each theft is minor. But a hundred of them over a single white paper, a deck, or a product brief and you've taken fifteen minutes from someone who trusted you with their attention.

They won't give it back.

We think the reader is the problem.

They have short attention spans. They're not paying close enough attention. They didn't read the whole thing. They just don't get it. They missed the key point on page four.

No. If the key point is on page four, that's your fault. You buried the value, with the audacity to believe they should stick around to find it.

Readers skim before they commit. They scan for evidence that continuing to read is worth their time. When they hit a wall of buzzwords, they stop, because they don't see a reason to continue.

The conclusion is your job. The clarity is your job. The respect for their time is your job.

Before you hit send on that next piece, read it out loud. Better yet, print it and read it out loud.

Every word that doesn't earn its place, cut it. Every hedge that exists to protect you from critics gets killed. Every sentence that sounds smart but doesn't move the reader closer to the conclusion comes out.

Then ask the question your reader is silently asking:

What are you actually saying?

Go back. Cut. Clarify. Make the point.

No one will thank you for the words you removed. But they'll understand you faster, trust you sooner, and remember you longer.