Smart Brevity to better communicate

Reviewing SMART BREVITY by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz is intimidating. Two dozen chapters illustrate “The Power of Saying More with Less.” VandeHei, Allen, and Schwartz, co-creators of Axios and Politico, encourage readers to improve communication by “adapt[ing] to how people consume content – not how you wish they did or did once upon a time.” Ultimately, they offer ideas to increase value and efficiency by being more direct and helpful while wasting less time. Our writing teachers would agree with advice to “know your audience,” but would likely discourage frequent use of bullet points or to “do all of this on one screen of a phone, regardless of what it is.” Not happening. Our students are learning to write, need practice and often struggle with expressing key ideas. However, they could relate to the case stories, amusing anecdotes, and memorable quotes (“have the courage to take your hands off the keyboard” or “blobs of text make the eye sad”) in this guidebook. In his review, The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim called SMART BREVITY “a slick, engaging and in some ways laudable effort;” he, too, raised a couple of points for follow-up: contrasting print versus screen reading and whether this writing style sacrifices nuance by identifying “the bottom line” versus encouraging readers to draw their own conclusions. Much to explore and contemplate here.