#BTSpeakingOut – A blurb on brevity

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

“Our brain knows what’s most interesting and important. Then we start to type—and we make it more complex, foggy, forgettable. This is true in all forms of communicating.” – (Smart Brevity)

The authors of Smart Brevity make a convincing case for less. Less paragraphs, sentences, and words. They run a media company and tell their reporters “short, not shallow”; but their book is not just for journalists.

It’s for students who want to make their papers/presentations more captivating, but especially for persons who run organizations where people usually ignore updates: corporations, countries, universities, and non-profits.

Roughly a third of emails, and a hundred percent of reports, go unread. The authors give journalists a hard time but as anyone who has had to suffer through business writing knows, the absolute worst offenders are in corporate. Appalling stuff.

Smart Brevity is not against long form writing, or tomes like Meltzer’s magisterial History of the Federal Reserve. The description to Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World reminds us that long form is in our DNA.

Mark Antony wanted to impress Cleopatra and gifted her two hundred books for her library. “The long and eventful history of the written word shows that books have always been and will always be a precious—and precarious—vehicle for civilization.” That’s not going to change, even in the world Twitter and Smart Brevity.

More words than we know what to do with will always be with us, “Of making many books there is no end” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Smart Brevity is aimed at anyone trying to communicate important information and updates to others in a distracted world: managers, teachers, pastors, and community leaders. In a word: you.

I leave you with three points that stuck with me: (1) “If we want vital information to stick in the digital world, we need to radically rethink—and repackage—how it is delivered; (2) Most readers live in a state that Linda Stone calls ‘continuous partial attention.’ Constantly thinking about the next text or email.”

Finally: “People are distracted and deluged but we still write and communicate as if they have our full attention.” They don’t. Their answer? “Adapt to how people consume content—not how you wish they did or they did once upon a time. Then, change how you communicate, immediately.”

If you want the details of how; read Smart Brevity. It should take you all of one evening but if you open TikTok you will finish it in a month, or two.

Adrian Sobers