Writing good short prose is a learned skill. It is neither easy nor a quick lesson to absorb, so it pays to practice. Master how to write the concise messages you mean to convey before your target scrolls on.

Unless you are addressing a captive audience who has no choice but to follow your every word, you have limited time to make an impact and hook your target. Whatever your platform, you cannot afford to take a chance on long peripheral intros, hoping your audience will still click that link or respond to your call to action. It is risky to ramble.

Of course, putting emphasis on relevance and pointedness is easier said than done, especially as we are all conditioned to scroll mere seconds into an uninteresting post. If you’ve written something that fails to engage and if someone even comments TLDR (too long, didn’t read), it’s a sign your style needs work.

Content overload has driven the need for being brief and getting to the point as we find ways to grab the attention of our target audience. That said, the art of conciseness has always been important in communications, and great writers know it takes time.

The best-known observation on the subject, one of several variations that have been attributed to different people over the years, is this alleged Mark Twain quote:

“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

Consensus is that it is probably the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal who first coined it in 1657, in his “Lettres provinciales” collection:

“I only made this one longer because I didn’t have the time to make it shorter.”

(“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.”)

High quality concise writing, and the time devoted to achieve it, has been valued for hundreds of years. Today, it can make the difference between holding your audience or losing it altogether. Whether you ultimately communicate in written or oral form, you will convey ideas, information, and even accompany images with words; are you sure you did the best you can do?

Writing and editing often takes time and several rewrites. It’s potentially tedious and frustrating, as the search for the perfect string of words goes on. It can be messy, looking nothing like the pretty flowery notebooks with perfectly aligned words in tidy lines, seen on esthetically pleasing images all over our social media.

It takes training and practice to eliminate filler words and redundant passages, to craft concise phrasing, to tighten texts or speeches. Eventually, you will gain an intuitive skill that helps create strong writing and copy editing that packs a punch and makes an impact.

Choose your words wisely, polish your writing until you have found the text that best embodies your message, and get to the point.

June 2024

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