Stripping a sentence down to its barest essentials is great advice, but building a community requires more than a Bare Bones effort.

My online friend and blog role model Adam Singer, whose creative thoughts have always inspired me, just wrote a post entitled “The Critical Few” in which he advocates paring down, rather than ramping up, the number of online touch points you (or your company) uses.

Here was my comment to that post:

As an English/journalism/marketing professor, I always tell my students:
“Sometimes Less is More, and sometimes More is More.”

When it comes to any one “sentence,” then YES, stripping a sentence to its cleanest, most essential components is necessary for the clearest communication — which SHOULD be the first objective in writing.

However, sometimes — in fact — More will be More; one example would be that More Engagement with community members will reap better results than simply “putting something out there,” even if that something is stated concisely