Stephen Doty
May, 2015
The Short-Remark Style
Our sense of humor wants brevity.
“What’s your daughter taking in college?”
“Everything I’ve got.”
That was an entire joke by Milton Berle.1
I think we have a sense of cogency that wants brevity as well, but without a laugh to signal it, its desires are rarely met. So readers are usually given too many words.
Think how often you skip part of a book or article. It seems as if every one could be shorter by half with no loss in take-away message.
So why aren’t writers more terse? For the same reasons we probably aren’t – habit, difficulty of the task, lack of awareness…
I suspect that another barrier to terseness is the cult of length we embraced as children. I used to think that writing a ten-page paper was a sign of intelligence, somehow better than a three-pager. Length was respected in itself and quality presumed to go with it.
For six years, I served as the judge of a college writing contest and was surprised to find that the longest submissions were usually the worst, though.2 Half of the winning submissions fit on one page. The longer ones typically violated Robert Louis Stevenson’s admonition in The Art of Writing – every fact should be “an ornament in its place and a pillar in the main design.”3 Gratuitous ornamentation invites us to skip it. Compare a page or two of George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
At Starbucks, a barista once told me that he wrote on the side. He gave me a sample, in which dialogue was continually interrupted by details of a fly in the room. I asked him what purpose the fly served – a metaphor for something? No, he said that it was just cool. Now I realize it was a good metaphor, after all – for what bugs the reader.
I think English teachers should start a brevity movement. Students cannot hand in a paper two paragraphs long until they can master one. Why allow them to build a wall when they can’t lay one row of bricks yet? Teachers would be spared hours of tedium, and the cult of length would be undermined. Also, take half a letter grade off for each error in punctuation, grammar, spelling, and for any lack of coherence. This would prepare students better for the real world, where brief, error-free letters and documents are demanded.
Lawyers are known for being wordy and can especially benefit from brevity, I think. When I clerked for a trial judge, we read many arguments for and against the motions filed.4 We found ourselves naturally prone to skim long arguments, as we dug for the relevant law and facts. The shorter arguments actually assisted the client’s cause. They gave the judge both the time and the inclination to reread them.
In philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche cleaved to aphoristic compression as an aesthetic ideal and as a source of pride. He wrote, “It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book” or “does not say.”5 On happiness, he needed one sentence: “The formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”6
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote austere remarks, usually numbered. He debunked the vague, pretentious use of words, often found in philosophy, and said that his method was “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”7 His later style was no-nonsense in every sense of the term and remains a prototype of the short-remark style,8 in which brevity is less a cause than a result of distilled, trenchant thinking.
Wittgenstein’s mentor at Cambridge University, Bertrand Russell, said he used to write with a formula in mind, rooted in his love of mathematics – express every idea in the fewest number of words possible.9 That’s still a good heuristic, along with choosing the right sequence of ideas, the precise words to express each, and the right tone.
Milton Berle did not offer a bunch of words instead of a punch line, as Mozart and McCartney did not offer a bunch of notes instead of a melody. Miles Davis said that the notes he omitted were as important to omit as were the ones he played. And Robert Louis Stevenson said, “There is but one art – to omit!”10
Our sense of humor wants a punch line. So does our sense of cogency.
1 Milton Berle, Private Joke Book (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1989) 175.
2 The Sylvia Plath Contest was open to students from Smith, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, and Bryn Mawr. This is a story about one contest winner from Bryn Mawr, Katherine Lewis: http://news.brynmawr.edu/2011/02/24/bryn-mawr-junior-katherine-lewis-wins-sylvia-plath-poetry-contest/
3 R.L. Stevenson, The Art of Writing (McLean, VA: Indy Publish) 73.
4 The Hon. Paul Parraguirre, Nye County, Tonopah, Nevada, 1989-90; now deceased, he was the father of the current Chief Justice of the Nevada Supreme Court.
5 F. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1976) 556.
6 F. Nietzsche 473.
7 L. Wittgenstein, trans. G. Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations 3rd. ed (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003) #116.
8 L. Wittgenstein, Investigations #464.
9 B. Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961) 63.
10 R.L. Stevenson, The Letters, Vol. 1: http://robert-louis-stevenson.classic-literature.co.uk/the-letters-of-robert-louis-stevenson-volume-1/ebook-page-100.asp