As a millennial, I have been shortening paragraphs, sentences and phrases since elementary school. Our generation created Internet slang and social media tools like Twitter—which force us to boil our message down to 140 characters or less. We are well versed in the art of never typing more than we need to, and never reading more than we can absorb in a few seconds.

As a B2B communications professional, I’ve realized that being fully immersed in social media has taught me a valuable lesson: Less is more. One of the most important things we can take away from Twitter’s little blue birdie is the ability to write concisely.

Here are five quick tips from PR Daily and Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think, to trim up your work:

1. “Happy talk must die,” suggests Krug. Happy talk is considered to be content-free and primarily sociable. Sentences like, “This episode contains,” and “In this report we strive to,” should be eliminated as often as possible (Krug 2006).
2.  Eliminate prepositions (of, in, about, for, onto, into). The sentence “In this movie is a portrayal of tomfoolery,” can easily be changed to the more direct “This movie portrays tomfoolery,” by simply removing a few prepositions.
3. Trim phrases down to words. For instance, “People who are skilled at couponing save money,” can be revised to “Skilled couponers save money.”
4. Remove the word, “that,” whenever possible. The sentence “We noticed that you’re spelunking,” can be shortened to “We noticed you’re spelunking.”
5. Delete the often cumbersome phrases, “which is,” “which are,” “who is,” and “who were.” “He won the award for best mustache, which is widely regarded as the best award one can win” is easily simplified to “He won the award for best mustache, widely regarded as the best award one can win.”

When your writing is concise, you have a better chance of engaging your audience. Let’s face it—if readers must muddle through a paragraph of noise before getting to the content of your piece, they will likely get bored and search for another. Fortunately, you can easily avoid having your piece skipped over – just remember what the little birdie told you.