Saying what you mean

Is actually quite easy: Just say it.

It’s amazing how much time we spend with looking for fancy ways of phrasing what we mean when the most powerful way of saying things is actually to just plainly say it.

Fancy is much overrated. Take one of the most famous advertising slogans of all time: “A thousand songs in your pocket”. There’s really nothing fancy about it. It’s just plain English.

But it’s concrete. It’s specific. It’s the result of asking “But what does it mean?” repeatedly until you’ve arrived at a plain English version of what “An MP3 player with a 5GB hard drive” actually means.

Relevance creates resonance. Fancy often misleads us away from relevance.