TL;DR
If your messages keep ballooning into paragraphs, you’re not overexplaining — you’re underdeciding. Clear decisions produce clear communication. Fuzzy decisions produce long, hedged, suspicion-inducing word salad. Fix the decision first, and the message takes care of itself.
You know the feeling. You’re three paragraphs deep into an email, and somehow it’s gotten longer instead of clearer. So you do what most of us do: you add another sentence to explain. Then another. Then a parenthetical. Then a “to be clear…” And before you know it, what should have been two sentences is sitting at two pages, and you’re still not sure it makes sense.
We tell ourselves we’re trying to explain it better. Most of the time, we’re not. We’re trying to write our way out of a decision we never actually made.
This is the companion piece to a post I wrote recently about why most “PR problems” are really decision problems. Same root principle, different application. Last time was about crises. This one’s about your everyday writing — your emails, your memos, your announcements, your Slack messages. The places where overexplaining quietly eats up your time and your team’s attention.
Here’s the punchline, and I’ll say it more than once on purpose: when the decision is clear, the explanation is simple.
The Real Diagnosis: Underdeciding, Not Overexplaining
Whenever someone hands me a draft and says, “I don’t think we’re explaining this well,” I ask a different question first. Not “what are you trying to say?” but “what’s the decision?”
About 80% of the time, the answer comes back fuzzy. “Well, we’re sort of thinking…” or “It depends on…” or “We want to leave room for…” That’s not explanation work. That’s decision work. And no amount of editing is going to fix it, because the writing is faithfully reflecting the mess upstream.
When a decision is clean, the message practically writes itself. What happened, what we’re doing about it, what it means going forward. Three beats. Done.
When a decision is fuzzy, the writing fills up with “if then,” “that said,” “caveat emptor,” “in some cases,” “we’ll evaluate as we go.” Qualifiers stacked on qualifiers. Context piled on context. Every sentence trying to cover an angle you haven’t actually decided on yet.
Raise your hand if you’ve been there. (I’m raising mine.)
That two-sentence message you needed to send? It just turned into a two-page memo. And it still doesn’t quite land.
What Long Messages Actually Do to Your Audience
Here’s the part that should genuinely scare you: people don’t read long, hedged messages. They interpret them.
They scan. They skim. They fill in the gaps with their own assumptions. And every reader fills those gaps differently, which means five people walk away with five different versions of what you meant. You set out to avoid confusion, and you accidentally manufactured a custom-built version of it for every person on the distribution list.
It gets worse. Long, hedged communication doesn’t just create confusion — it creates suspicion.
When something runs too long for the situation, people start wondering what’s being buried in there. Why is this so long? What are they trying not to say? What’s in the fine print? What didn’t they want me to notice? Even if you weren’t hiding anything, the length itself starts to feel like cover.
Now you’ve stacked a credibility problem on top of a clarity problem. You went in to avoid one issue and created two.
And here’s the kicker: that’s not a communication problem. That’s a decision problem you tried to manage with language. The language didn’t carry the weight, because there was no real weight behind it.
The Walt Whitman Trap
There’s a famous quote from Mark Twain that I love: “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to edit it.”
It’s such a great quote because it gets at something most people get backwards. Brevity isn’t the easy version of writing. Brevity is the hard version. Length is what happens when you don’t have the time, or haven’t done the thinking, to be short (a similar quote I love is “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time,” by the French philosopher Blaise Paschal).
When we’re uncertain, we reach for more words. We think length signals seriousness or care or thoroughness. It doesn’t. Most of the time, more words just mean more confusion — and an audience that has to work harder to figure out what we actually want them to do.
People can feel the difference, too, between someone who has decided and someone who is still hedging. The decided communicator sounds calm and direct. The hedger sounds like they’re negotiating with themselves in real time. You can tell which one you’d rather follow.
The Shift: Decide First, Write Second
Here’s the practical move. Before you draft anything — internal, external, big, small, doesn’t matter — ask yourself one question.
Not “what’s the context?” or “what’s the background?” or “what nuance am I missing?”
Just: What’s the decision?
If you can answer that in one clean sentence, you’re ready to write. The message will be short, sturdy, and easy to trust, because it’s resting on something solid.
If you can’t answer it in one clean sentence — stop writing. Go back upstream. Talk to whoever needs to be talked to. Make the call. Get the decision clean. Then come back to the keyboard.
I’d love to give you a more complicated framework here, but the truth is it’s just four steps:
- State the decision in one sentence.
- State what’s happening as a result.
- State what comes next.
- Stop.
That’s it. No “I just wanted to flag…” opener. No “as you may be aware…” preamble. No closing paragraph of “we’ll continue to evaluate as the situation evolves.” If you’ve decided, you don’t need any of that. If you haven’t decided, all of it is camouflage.
The counterintuitive instruction — and this is the one I want people to walk away with:
When your communication feels long, don’t start editing. Start deciding.
Editing a draft that’s built on a fuzzy decision is rearranging the deck chairs. You can make it prettier, shorter, more elegant. It still won’t land. Because the problem was never the words.
Decide Better, Write Less
The shortest, clearest communicators aren’t necessarily the best writers. They’re the best deciders. Their messages are tight because their thinking is tight. The work that looks like editorial skill on the page actually happened in a conference room, in a 1:1, in a quiet moment before anyone opened a laptop.
So the next time you’re staring at a draft that won’t tighten up — the email you’ve rewritten four times, the announcement that keeps growing instead of shrinking, the memo that feels like it’s saying everything and nothing — pause. The problem probably isn’t your prose. It’s upstream.
When the decision is clear, the explanation is simple. And when your communication feels long, don’t start editing. Start deciding.
Your team will read more of what you write. They’ll trust it more. They’ll act on it faster. And you’ll spend a lot less time wrestling with paragraphs that were never going to work in the first place.
Want more on this topic? Listen to the full episode on the Everything Speaks podcast.