American business has a weight problem: its communications are obese.

Unintentionally, I recently documented the size of this problem.

In December, we began work for an investment firm. Curious, I compared their old website with our new version. With no loss of meaning, every new section was 39-41% shorter.

In February we began helping a commercial real estate company. Again, we compared their old and new copy. It, too, was 40% shorter.

Last week, we pruned a Silicon Valley tech company's home page, and you guessed it.

These experiences reminded me of John Wanamaker’s well-known quote. "Half of my advertising is wasted," the famous retailer said. "The problem is, I don't know which half."

With few exceptions, over half of sales and marketing copy today is wasted. It's stuffed with flabby claims and pronouncements of philosophy, corpulent adverbs and adjectives, and slow waddlings toward ideas rather than beelines to them. No doubt I fail, too. And when I do, you stop reading.

The next time you look at your communications, look harder. See those ten lines of copy? Shrink them to six. Five paragraphs? Shrink them to three.

Shorter copy is clearer, and people buy clarity.

Follow the 40 percent rule. Cut all of your copy in half, and then a little more.

In The News

Speaking of overweight websites, consider the popular "In the News" sections on many of them.

1. Read every sentence and ask, "What's a faster way to say that?"
2. If you've written two sentences to explain one idea, your first sentence wasn't clear enough.
3. If a phrase sounds familiar, eliminate it.
4. Make sure your first sentence compels people to read your next.
5. If you prove it, you needn't say it. If you don't prove it, there's no point in saying it.
6. Well-chosen words suggest well-thought ideas.
7. Never show off. The word "utilize," for example, is the word "use" with a loud tie. And no one knows what "paradigms" are. (Some people guess that they're two coins.)
8. Readers don't care how good you are. They care how good you can help them be.

Just out, the YouTube awards suggest that while life is hard, comedy is nearly impossible. Also, the four nominations for videos starring cats (including a startling one featuring an alligator in a surprise cameo) suggest that Morris, Garfield, and The Cat in the Hat simply tap a human fascination with felines. (Our snooty Himalayan Simone has flown -- eight stories -- and lived to purr about it.)

I am featured in the new book The Ten Secrets of the World's Best Communicators. Great news, but learning this prompts this:

Why don't my kids understand me?

After thorough study, Nobel Laureate Ed Purcell concluded that every baseball record was in the realm of probability -- except Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. (Perhaps. But someone will beat that record several centuries before anyone even threatens the one unbreakable record in sports: Johnny VanderMeer's two consecutive no-hitters.)

Howard Shultz has decided the key to Starbuck’s future is superior-tasting coffee. But superior taste didn’t work for flame-broiled Burger King, nor Coke, nor Pepsi Challenge Winner Pepsi, and all three companies soon abandoned those taste-focused strategies. We bet that strategy won't won’t work for Starbucks, either; we are quoting 12-1 odds against him.

Before he proceeds, Schulz should reconsider this: in blind taste tests, people prefer McDonald's coffee to Starbucks. But a person is more apt to hit in 57 consecutive baseball games than to decide, "Gosh, I'd love some good coffee. Better head to McDonald's."

Show of hands: Who reading this would ever stop at McDonald's for coffee? In the words of Ben Stein's character in Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

"Anyone? Anyone?"