Quotes About Conciseness

The beauty of the quote is not to overthink it, but to compress your present thoughts into one line.

A good sketch is better than a long speech.

Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours (A good sketch is better than a long speech)

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time.

Be interesting, be enthusiastic... and don't talk to much.

Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.

Hay que ser muy simple para resultar siempre coherente.

Less is more, more or less.

Good description is fast, spare, specific, and showing. Weak description is slow, wordy, vague, abstract, and telling.

Obviously, we can't cut all prepositions, nor should we try. But keeping them to a minimum offers a quick route to clarity, simplicity, and brevity.

A useful guideline is to limit to three the numbers in a sentence—three seems to be all the reader's brain can

Cut everything superfluous,' Pound had said. 'Go in fear of abstractions. Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

you can't say everything, the fact that you have to winnow your thoughts down to the essentials, means that you can get to the heart of the matter quickly.

You must be able to say the sentences you write. And so they cannot be long and serpentine things that curl around clauses, caress subclauses, encompass extended metaphor, stop briefly for a whimsical digression and culminate, ultimately, in a long and rhythmic peroration that signals to your audience that you would not take it unkindly if they, at just about this moment, would interrupt you with vigorous and sustained applause.

It is usually and paradoxically true that the more important the message, the less time required to say it.

NO SPEECH SHOULD LAST MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES

When you are thinking about what you want to say, it is often helpful to define it down, in your own mind, to a sentence or two.

Always reduce it down. This keeps it from having a false bigness in your mind, and allows you to get your hands around it. Another way to get a handle on what you want to say is to ask: What does this speech have to do? Every speech has a job, a reason for being.

Epigrams succeed where epics fail.