Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less (Revised and Updated)

by Jim Vandehei

Pope Francis, in September 2021, told Catholic priests in Slovakia to cut homilies from 40 minutes to 10, or people would lose interest. “It was the nuns who applauded most because they are the victims of our homilies,” he joked. • The pope did what you should do: Start any communication by thinking first of your very specific audience and what they need or want.

The Axios audience team found that roughly 6 words is the optimal subject line for emails—short enough to show all words in a mobile phone format.

Berenbaum has found that useful content—tips and training—also helps amp up his engagement.

So if you’re writing an update to your team or a note to friends, imagine you’re talking to them on the elevator with no time to spare. • If they were headed out the door, what is the one thing you would shout and hope they don’t forget? That’s your opening sentence.

Purge WEAK words. A good rule of thumb is if you wouldn’t say it at a bar or the beach, kill it. These limp or nerd words come in many forms.

• If people know you are picky, they will take notice when you shake ’em by the lapels: “Pay attention to this.”

Newsletters are rocketing in popularity inside workplaces and journalism because they bring order and efficiency to complex businesses or topics.

People hate memos, ignore reports, miss emails. We do; you do. A Smart Brevity newsletter, even for a small leadership team or group of friends, demands to be read and can even be a pleasure. Sprinkle in a little candy—GIFs, cartoons, personal news, photos from the team—it’s a great way to get known and to instantly make a difference. As someone who’s trying to communicate, you suddenly have FOMO on your side. Who wants to be the only person on the team who didn’t see an announcement about a wedding that you placed at the end of your weekly in-house newsletter?

Communicating a company’s values is now essential to both attracting and retaining the best talent. Axios HQ users found that weekly updates by each department, project or team done with a predictable template and cadence helps: • Align people around values, strategies, a common culture. • Articulate diversity, inclusion, and equity plans and progress. • Explain in order of importance the most pressing tasks to be done. • Update others on progress or changes and keep clients fully looped in. • Maintain a living library of the essential strategic decisions and thinking.

Lights On from our revenue team . . . Cranes from Axios Local . . . Click Clack from our web-traffic guru . . . The Funnel from our head of growth . . . The TopLine from our sales warriors. • Those are just a few of the newsletters regularly published by Axios execs using Axios HQ—for their bosses, their teams and their colleagues across the company. Why it matters: This gives winners a forum for sharing best practices, encourages healthy competition among business units and gets rid of silos—everyone has visibility on what everyone’s up to.

The style guide of the National Association of Black Journalists is organized alphabetically to help with specific terms. • Just browsing the entries reminded us of how different people can hear words and phrases in very different ways.