Quotes About Conciseness

Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Less explanation is more convincing than more explanation.

I try to just communicate what I want done as clearly and simply as possible.

A good sketch is better than a long speech.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

For it is eloquence all the same whether few things are said in many words, or many things in few words.

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. While energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points. I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their reports are shorter.

He wrote: "Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational." The resulting prose, he wrote, "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

Tell me everything at once.

It is sheer laziness not compressing thought into a reasonable space

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.

Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.

Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy. If you don't need an explanatory principle, don't invoke it.

I say things directly and to the point because I don't know anything else.

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate.

When I watch a movie, I don't want to see the extra bits.

It's the bane of my life and my existence, people telling me to be a little more succinct with what I write.

LAW 4 Always Say Less Than Necessary When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.

I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.

Be on as few pieces of paper as it is possible for a human being to be.