Keep It Tight

I’ve shared before that I tend to use as few words as possible when writing or speaking. It was something that I tried for a while to “fix” before I realized that it was already a pretty good thing.

Fewer words doesn’t mean that something needs to be thin, just that you can remove the excess bloat. While most of my posts on here are under 300 words (this one is just 207 words), I have some that are much longer (Roam Research at 2,038 words and the Digital Efficiency Framework at 2,976 words).

In her book “Everybody Writes“, author Ann Handley puts it like this:

“Brevity doesn’t mean bare bones or stripped down. Take as long as you need to tell the story. (The length of content is dictated by the kind of content you’re creating.) The notion of brevity has more to do with cutting fat, bloat, and things that indulge the writer and don’t respect the reader’s time. Keep it tight.”

Mark Twain summarized in fewer words than that:

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

Take as long as you need to get your thoughts across, but the more junk you can trim out, the better.