874 Words on Brevity

Keep it short.  Keep it simple. These are a couple of the most basic rules of communicating and public relations.

You keep it short because attention spans are short.  You keep it simple because people are, well, simple.

I learned this lesson early in my professional life, in my very first job out of college.  My job was to respond either by letter (See: letter)or email to letters or emails sent by constituents to the governor’s office.  We would get our stack of correspondence each day based on our issues of “expertise,” and we would draft responses back to those people anxiously waiting by their mailboxes. 

As I got my feet wet in this new job, my boss would regularly send me back to edit drafts with the instruction: “It’s too long.  Shorten it up.  And when you think it’s short enough, go back and trim some more.”

See, I’d recently come from the shiny halls of higher education, where in my mind my grade on term papers would rise in direct proportion to the number of big, fancy, long words I used in big, fancy, long sentences that made up my big, fancy, long paragraphs.

I was, of course, wrong.  One day during my senior year, my Lithuanian political science professor threw a paper back at me in disgust and spit out: “Words, words, words.  Mr. Resch, you will make an outstanding journalist, because you have mastered the art of writing about absolutely nothing.”

His message to me, scribbled with disdain at the top of my paper, was indeed short and simple.

“Do again.”

So, I did. And doing my professor one better, rather than becoming a journalist, I got my Ph. D in Words, Words, Words and went into P.R.

Why is it so hard to keep things short and simple? 

Twitter, for example, was a platform designed explicitly to force short and simple communications.  140 characters.  Not even 140 words.  Characters. 

Then they went to 280, and now the “thread” has laid waste to the brevity of the original design.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the need to share my thoughts on the impact COVID protocols have had on inflation, education reforms, climate change, and pre-February 24 Russia/Ukraine relations. 1/37”

Twitter threads have become the op-ed pages of our attention-deficit age. 

Speaking of attention-deficits, my 11-year-old son said to me the other day the eight words every father wakes up each morning hoping to hear. 

“Dad, will you be a guest on my podcast?”

“Podcast?  You have a podcast?” I replied.

“I have to do one for school, and I need to interview someone.  Will you do it?”

“Sure.  Of course.  What do you want to talk about?”

“Sports.”

“Ok, sports,” I replied.  “What about sports?”

“I want to talk to you about the sports you played and which ones you liked best.”

“Ok, no problem.  I can do that.”

“So, what sports did you play?” he asked, as part of his real-time show prep.

“Well, I played baseball from 2nd to 7th grades, and then I played basketball and soccer in middle school.”

“Ok, but what about after that?” he asked in a tone which implied I didn’t understand his original question.

“What do you mean, ‘after that’?  I didn’t really play sports after that.  I really wasn’t good enough at any sport to make a team in high school.”

 “What?!  You didn’t play in college or the pros?”

“Ahhh, no.  Sorry, just in middle school.  Do you still want me on your podcast?” I asked, wondering if I was being cut more coldly than after my tryouts for the freshman basketball team.

“Well, you like sports, right?”

“Sure, of course.”

“I guess I can ask you about that.”

And so, we proceeded to the “studio” (my bedroom, because “it’s quieter in there.”), with his school-issued iPad in hand. 

“Ok,” he instructed.  “I’m going to do a short intro, and then I’ll ask you questions about sports.”

“Got it,” I replied.

Garage Band on.  Test.  Test.  Delete file.  Test again.  Delete file.  Recording… recording.  Intro.  Questions.  Four minutes.  Done.

“Done?  What?  That’s it?” I asked.

“Yep,” the producer/director/sound guy/host replied.

“That was like four minutes. It was super short.”

“Look, I got everything I needed,” he said.  “In this case, shorter is better.”

Well said, professor.

P.S.  The Lithuania professor I mentioned, Aleksandras Stromas, died in 1999.  It was rumored while I was in school that he contributed to the drafting of the new Russian constitution after the fall of the Soviet Union.  I’m not entirely sure if that was true, but I always felt a little bit better about almost failing a class taught by someone who had.  And while I’m quite certain anything he would say today about the current Russian invasion of Ukraine would still go considerably over my head, I would still love to hear his perspective.

RIP Dr. Stromas.