Equivalent facts can lead to different choices depending on how they are framed.
More quotes“Overnight.”
Clear. Short. Dead.
“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”
Longer by eight words, easier to hear and far closer to the customer’s state of mind. The repetition creates insistence; the final word delivers the service after the anxiety has been allowed into the sentence.
Word count is a wonderfully crude way to judge simplicity. “Comprehensive solutions” uses two words and says bugger all. A twelve-word line with a clean rhythm, concrete situation and one promise can be much easier to remember.
The ear is doing part of the work. People retain patterns, stresses and expected completions. Removing every supposedly unnecessary word can strip away the part that made a sentence portable. A chorus would perform badly under a rigid word-count rule.
Length still has to earn its keep. Clauses added to satisfy six stakeholders produce legal archaeology, not memorability. The test is whether each extra word strengthens sound, meaning, image or tension. If it merely prevents somebody internally feeling left out, the audience has been made to carry a private disagreement.
Read the line once, hide it and ask for the words back. Then ask which company or promise it belongs to. A catchy sentence with no owner is unpaid entertainment.
“Overnight” returns accurately.
The longer line returns imperfectly—absolutely, positively, overnight—and carries the urgency with it. Three remembered beats can be worth more than one impeccable little corpse.