Your reader’s time is precious. At Jellyfish, we’re interested in making the most of this scarce resource – by delivering the key information as quickly and efficiently as we can.

But, in pursuit of this goal, there’s an enemy we regularly encounter: filler copy. By this, we mean copy that doesn’t move the argument forward or tell the reader anything new.

In this guide, we’ll draw attention to a few common ways that filler can rear its ugly (and superfluously large) head. We’ll also provide some nifty techniques to help you slay the beast.

Excited? Marvellous. Let’s get started.

Here’s an example of copy repeating itself:

Omega 6 fatty acid is part of an essential group of nutrients that cannot be made by our bodies, so must be consumed within our diets. We cannot make them ourselves, but our body needs these important nutrients, so we must get from external food sources.

Break the first sentence down into its constituent parts, and you’ll notice it’s saying three things:

Break the second sentence down, and you’ll notice it’s also saying three things:

Sorry if we repeated ourselves there. But at least it made the issue obvious: no one wants to read the same thing twice (even if the phrasing is slightly different). Here’s our filler-free revision:

Omega 6 fatty acids are part of a vital group of nutrients – called essential fatty acids – that your body relies on your diet to provide.

When writing anything, you should have in mind its purpose and its audience. Take a look at this blog intro:

Freshly Prepared Healthy Food for Puggles

A nutritious diet is the foundation of good health for any dog, so the importance of your dog’s daily diet can't be underestimated. You need to know that what you are feeding them is providing them with all the building blocks their body needs in order to stay fit and healthy and ready for fun

It might not be immediately clear what’s wrong here. The copy is well written, and each sentence adds new information.

However, there is a problem: it isn’t relevant to the topic of the article. When a reader spies the title ‘Freshly Prepared Healthy Food for Puggles’, they are going to expect the first section to be about Puggles (an adorable breed of dog) specifically. These general claims about dog nutrition are useful to have – but they should be framed in relation to Puggles. After all, that’s what the reader is here for. Revising with this idea in mind, we get:

Puggles are curious, lovable, family dogs that just adore being by your side. Even though the name sounds like one something from the Harry Potter universe, a Puggle is actually a cross between a Beagle and a Pug.

The importance of your Puggle’s daily diet can't be underestimated. You need to know that what you're feeding them is providing exactly what their Puggle body needs to stay fit, healthy and ready for roly-poly fun.

This (slightly longer) intro does a far better job of speaking to the article’s target audience.

The next section is, perhaps, the most wonderfully splendiferous of them all; here is where we will teach you to cut down the unnecessary verbiage in your writing, and to ensure that everything you say is perfectly pithy, incisive and, above all, brief!

Okay. Back to normal now. But you get the point – unnecessary wordiness is an easy way to make your writing impenetrable. It requires the reader to hold too much information in their head, forces them to Google words, and, in particularly bad cases, makes them feel stupid.

Let’s break things down a little. When we say wordiness, we mean:

Here’s what it looks like:

With an impressively large choice of tubs, including whirlpool and many other varieties, you can find your luxury in the Kohler Underscore collection. Enjoy a spa-like experience at home in an airbath with BubbleMassage hydrotherapy features, wash away the stresses of the day in a luxuriously deep freestanding tub, or unwind to your own music through hidden speakers with Kohler’s VibrAcoustic sound technology, and choose from a variety of styles, shapes, and colours, including white, almond, thunder grey, and black.

To revise your work effectively, you need to interrogate every linguistic choice and strip the copy down as much possible. For maximum readability, each sentence should convey only one idea. There are many tools you can use to help with this – one particularly good one is

Hemingway Editor.

Here’s that same example revised with the above in mind:

Find your dream tension-relieving tub in Kohler Underscore’s vast selection of tubs and whirlpools. Choose from a variety of styles and shapes, and from an array of colours including almond and thunder grey. Innovative technologies, such as BubbleMassage and VibrAcoustic sound, make relaxation even easier.

Notice how we’ve tactically positioned verbs at the beginning of sentences. This is intended to guide the reader so that they understand what each sentence is about as soon as they start reading it. We’ve also cut out some information. For example, we’ve listed two colours instead of four. The aim here is to not be too exhaustive in our explanation, because we want to entice the reader to explore the collection for themselves.