There's an easy way to prevent the PR disease known as talking paragraphs.
How do you know if your text suffers from this malady?
It's simple: true talking points take up a single line. Maybe two.
Talking paragraphs are a page of long paragraphs with bullets tacked on.
The danger of talking paragraphs is that they defeat the entire purpose of doing a page of bullets in the first place.
Talking points are supposed to give people an easy way to understand an issue and talk about it, to inform or persuade using the best facts and arguments.
They point is to boil an issue down into something simple, clear and catchy.
Talking paragraphs are none of those things. They're long. They're confusing. They don't do the job. They're like a cancer, starting small, then growing uncontrollably until they choke the life out of what started out as perfectly good talking points.
Here are some easy ways to prevent -- or cure -- talking paragraphs.
1) Prevention -- When you start writing talking points, bump up your point size to 22 point and then don't let yourself go longer than a line. Two lines if you really must.
2) Treatment -- If you're staring at a full-on case of talking paragraphs, get out the scalpel. Cut out every bullet that's not absolutely critical. Then go into every remaining bullet and kill every sentence, phrase and word that you can. Now bump it up to 22 point and kill more words. Use sentence fragments. Be brutal.
3) Cure -- If treatment doesn't work, print out the page of talking paragraphs and use a highlighter to identify the best lines, arguments and facts. Start a new document and protect yourself from talking paragraphs by using 22 point text and one or two lines, max.
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