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

by Jim Vandehei

It takes most people more than 20 minutes to snap back into focus after a distraction.

A lunch-spattered piece of paper hangs on the wall of the Arlington, Virginia, newsroom of our start-up, Axios. It reads: “Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.”

All they usually want to know is what’s new and “Why it matters.” Give them that.

People want to know something new, revelatory, exciting. And they want you to put it in context and explain “Why it matters.” Then, with a visual or verbal cue, they decide whether to “Go deeper” into the conversation.

One strong first sentence, or “lede”: Your opening sentence should be the most memorable—tell me something I don’t know, would want to know, should know. Make this sentence as direct, short and sharp as possible.

This was during President Trump’s administration, and the agency knew that its “First Customer” had the attention span of a flea.

“Blobs of text make the eye sad”

We tend to think too much about what we want to say versus what others need to hear.

Picture in your head the person you’re trying to reach. This is easy if it’s a single individual, but if you’re targeting a group, zero in on a specific individual, a name, a face, a job. • Always do this before you start communicating. If you try to speak to everyone, usually you reach no one. Singling out the person you want to reach clarifies things big-time.

➊ Focus on ONE person you are targeting. ➋ Plot out ONE thing you want them to remember.

“If there’s only one thing you remember from this talk . . .”

Do these things and people will stop rolling their eyes— or ignoring you—when you present them with a new idea or message.

The most important words you type are subject lines, headlines and the first line of tweets, notes or papers. You need to grab me, entice me, seduce me.

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.

there is one thing you take away from this book, it is this: Learn to identify and trumpet ONE thing you want people to know.

Team of Vipers

• Words no human would say: These exist only in journalism, academia, think tanks and research papers. When we worked in newspapers, sharp editors called these “journalese”—a dying language, thankfully. discourse (talk) challenge (problem, shitshow) posit (assume) dearth (lack) paucity (scarcity) obfuscate (hide) ubiquitous (everywhere) veracity (truth) altercation (fight) vehement (forceful) disseminate (spread) raison d’être (purpose)

The average person reads roughly 265 words per minute—the number we use in this book to calculate read time. Do your own math.

“We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of ‘study hall.’” • Six smart sentences will suffice! • Outline the specific decisions or actions to make or take, if possible.

• Fun fact: We allow every employee to ask anything anonymously—absolutely anything—and read the question verbatim in a weekly meeting, no matter how blunt or rude, then answer it. Yes, this can be awkward.

• Then, if you’re writing something sensitive or overly complicated or anything really, run it by someone who’s had different experiences than you or who has lived a different life than you have.