I was mid-story at a dinner last week when I blanked on the name of the guy the whole story hung on. I spent about ten seconds reaching for it while the table waited. Something in my brain wouldn't move on until I'd placed it. Eventually I gave up, said "anyway, this guy," and kept going.
The punchline landed fine. There was no gap in the story for them, only for me.
Your copy has the same problem.
When we write about the thing we sell, we write about what we know. The feature that took six months to build. The certification that nearly broke us. The seventh revision of the hinge mechanism that finally closed with the right amount of resistance.
Look at any menu that lists eleven ingredients per dish. Any property listing that names the dishwasher brand. A software page with a wall of specs sitting above the one sentence that explains what the thing actually does. Someone sweated over every one of those details, and leaving them out felt like leaving the story unfinished.
But the reader doesn't need everything. They're skimming, deciding in a few seconds whether any of this is for them and every irrelevant detail just creates more distance between them and the punchline.
So read it back as the person you're selling to, not the person who wrote it. Go through it line by line. For each detail, ask whether they'd notice if it were gone. Most of the time the answer is no. Start with the lines you'd hate to lose.
Cutting weak writing is easy. It feels like tidying up.
Writing to sell means cutting stuff that hurts.
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Three things that made me write this:
- I helped a friend cut their About page. Every line I flagged, they said "but that's important." I asked who it was important to. They said it was important to them. I reminded them they're not the one buying their own stuff.
- I killed a sentence in this post I loved. Ten minutes to write, four seconds to delete. The post got better the moment it was gone.
- The forgotten name finally surfaced at 2am. Nobody needed it by then, including me.
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