When Brevity Isn't Smart

It has its place, but let's not make it ubiquitous

“I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one.”

— Blaise Pascal (not Mark Twain)

The book Smart Brevity claims it will “make you a more forceful communicator.” It provides some sound advice and useful tips that are well worth following, especially for communications like informational emails. It also prescribes some rules and formulas that just aren’t appropriate for a lot of writing.

Why it matters:

We all know that we’re drowning in words — or as we refer to them now, “information.” We’re bombarded daily by emails, news items, social media posts, texts, DMs, and IMs of all kinds. 

Worse still, according to the authors of Smart Brevity, most of the words we write go unread: a full third of work emails that need attention, most words in news stories, and most chapters in most books.

The result, they claim, is “billions of wasted words.” While there are plenty of words to go around, that translates to billions of wasted minutes and hours, as well as the energy — both human and electronic — required to write all those words.

• The real problem is that when we write words, we want them to be heard. Instead, our words are getting lost in the ever-growing pile of pixels. 

• The Smart Brevity system promises to change that by “guiding you into saying a lot more with a lot less.”

Zoom in:

Smart Brevity authors Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz co-founded Axios, a news organization that offers “smarter, more efficient coverage of the topics shaping the fast-changing world.”

I regularly read their clean-energy and climate coverage, and I find it useful. I can quickly take in relevant information and sometimes dig deeper if a story provides further details.

This Axios writers are inspired by this aphorism, which hangs in their office:

Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.

It reminds me of a guy I went out with many, many years ago. His need to qualify and expound on everything seemed to stem from a deep-rooted insecurity that resulted in the most ridiculous conflicts I’ve ever experienced in a relationship. When I broke up with him in exasperation, he told me that he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with me — and that he’d never said that to anyone. Then he reflected for a second and thought better of his statement. Well, maybe he’d said something like that to someone way back … oh, and maybe he’d thought about it with someone else … and then there was that other one … By the time he was done, I had to restrain myself from laughing — while inwardly congratulating myself on making the right decision.

Reader, he lost me.

His message certainly lost its punch.

There’s a lot to be said for getting to the point. Smart Brevity offers some tips for doing so and some great examples that are especially useful for:

• Work-related emails or any email intended to convey information quickly

• Presentations that will grab the attention of your audience

• Business and sales pitches

• Website landing pages

The Smart Brevity system has nothing to say about breakups, but it does cover asking for a raise, sending emails about your child’s birthday party, and making an apology.

A few good tips:

• Think about one person you want to reach. Nothing too new about the advice to know your audience, but okay. Not a bad way of framing it.

• Focus on the one thing you want them to remember. I didn’t love my junior year high school English class. But to this day, I remember something the teacher told us: “If you remember one thing from this class, remember the Rule of Three.” Good anecdotal evidence that calling out one thing to remember can be effective.

• Write like a human and use strong words. I heartily agree that we should avoid saying “price point” when we mean “price” and eschew other annoying business-speak. Corporate jargon is the worst, as Rafael and I illustrated in our corporate wedding vows.

Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

Yes, but:

Still, as I progressed through the book, I found myself feeling frustrated. Yes, we are all overwhelmed. Yes, our attention spans are suffering.

But is this reason enough to shorten EVERYTHING?

The Smart Brevity authors are basically saying: The internet has changed how we consume information. But we’re still communicating in the old ways, and we need to keep up with the times.

I can’t help questioning the value of aiming for the lowest common denominator just because the bar has been set so low. And maybe reading is about more than just “consuming information.”

Am I an old curmudgeon? As a Flower Child, I may be getting old and set in my ways, but I still believe there’s a place for in-depth writing and reading (though that’s certainly harder to do online; I read the hardback edition of Smart Brevity to ensure I got the most out of it).

While the authors claim they don’t intend to lose nuance, a lot is lost when you cut your text too drastically. It can take complexity to explain simplicity. The authors do acknowledge that there’s a time and place for long-form writing, but for the most part the book seems dismissive of it.

Back to this aphorism:

Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.

Like a wool sweater that’s washed in hot water, this saying is so boiled down that it loses its function. And that’s the problem with a lot of advice in Smart Brevity, like these tips:

• Limit headlines and subject lines to six words. Oddly, I’ve seen lots of Axios stories with longer headlines.

• Stop being funny or clever. What? That’s no fun. While that may be appropriate in quick news items or business emails, there’s a place for cleverness — in fact, the Smart Brevity authors provide an example of it from a TED talk they reference with admiration.

• Don’t use words like dearth, challenge, and ubiquitous. No. Just no. I am not going to dumb down my writing to avoid “words no human would say,” as the authors call them. And no, “verisimilitude” does not mean “real,” as they suggest. In fact, it means “the appearance of being true or real,” a very different thing, and by using it you’re substituting one word for seven. Plus it’s a noun, so you can’t replace it with an adjective. Sheesh.

  

• Keep words to one syllable when possible. Really? I just can’t …

The bottom line:

• Smart Brevity is not a book for writers. In fact, it claims that one of its own authors is better in person than at the keyboard.

• Despite my many critiques and fervent head-shaking, I routinely “Smart Brevity” my communications when I’m trying to get a quick point across in a focused way. (Ack! I used Smart Brevity as a verb! Forgive me!)

• The book provides useful guidance for tightening up your communications, especially at work, and it’s worth reading for that. But its advice should be taken with a grain of salt and applied judiciously. Context is everything.

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While this post is not at all brief, I wrote it using the Smart Brevity structure, which I found a bit limiting — though I do like it for the short Axios media pieces. What do you think of this format?