Steve Jobs, John Steinbeck and Mark Bowden walk into a bar...
Few virtues are so valuable across so many disciplines as brevity. According to HubSpot, people consume an average of 285 pieces of content each day. Skeptical? Think memes, Instagram posts, billboards, emails and YouTube. If you want to cut through the noise, each word has to support the overall message.
Whether you're writing to entertain, to educate or to persuade, a good piece of content will typically represent a small fraction of all previous drafts. If you don't believe me, ask this guy:
My favorite book, East of Eden, is 600 pages long, but has not one extraneous word. A business pitch can be far too long at only twenty slides, or an article at 400 words. Alternatively, a 340-page novel can seem stunted. I’m not endorsing Twitter, I’m endorsing brevity.
True brevity is focused, not lazy. It can be hard work. More to the point, drawn-out explanations tax people's patience. Even the godfathers of English literary style weighed in on this:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” – William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style
The amount of work that goes into a simple message is rarely appreciated, but the message itself will resonate more. Ultimately, that's what matters.
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