Are your sales letters going on five pages long? Do you pepper your prose with such corporate clichés as "empower," "paradigm" and "synergy"? Take your last piece of marketing writing-a sales letter, proposal or brochure-and apply the following six tips. Your marketing piece will be more forceful, confident and precise.

1. There are better ways to start a sentence than with "there are."
The same goes for "it is." These empty subjects and weak verbs add no meaning and sap your writing of vigor. Rearrange sentences where possible to avoid these fillers.

Not: There are thousands of dinosaurs on the earth today.
But: Thousands of dinosaurs roam the earth today.

2. Empower yourself to avoid clichés.
The Dilbert strips don't lie: some words and expressions are so overused that they've been reduced to meaningless corporate-ese. Among these are:

Empower
paradigm
synergy
downsize
utilize
proactive
dialogue

3. Eliminate repetitive redundancies.
Of course you give something away "for free." How else would you do it? And we know you think "to yourself." Who else would you be thinking to? Go through your writing and do a search and destroy on redundancies such as:

green in color
large in size
new innovation
end result
final outcome

4. Passives should be done away with.
A passive verb makes for a weak, roundabout way of saying something. It isn't always possible to replace a passive verb with an active verb-but do it when you can, and see how much stronger your sentences become:

Not: The problem of our exploding computers was discussed at the meeting.
But: We discussed the problem of our exploding computers at the meeting.

5. These are some pretty bad adverbs.
"Pretty," "little," "very," "quite": These are the "fudging" adverbs that drain your writing of conviction. Drop them, and the meaning of your sentence becomes clear.

Not: I was very concerned that our computers were quite unsafe.
But: I was concerned that our computers were unsafe.

We use the verb "say" so much that we tend to gloss right over all the "he saids" and "she saids." Once in a while it's refreshing to use a different verb. But constantly going out of your way to use different verbs in place of "say" jolts the reader from the flow of the writing.