Twenty years ago, I spent a week in Guatemala with my new regional leader as I stepped into a new leadership role.
One evening, he forwarded me every email he’d received that day. His instructions were simple. Go back to the hotel. Write a response to every one of them. Don’t send any of them.
I spent the next several hours drafting “perfect” responses to every email he had received. The next day, he put my responses up on a projected screen and started deleting. When he finished, about 85 percent of what I’d written was gone.
I pushed back. I’d written all that detail on purpose. I was trying to bring clarity.
He didn’t budge, “When you spell out every detail, anything you don’t name gets treated as if it doesn’t matter. My extra words weren’t adding clarity, at best they were creating confusion and at worst, they were opening up loopholes.
After we finished a painful exercise, Phil said, “Answer the question that was asked, not every possibility you can come up with.”
AI was supposed to make email better. It made it longer.
I’ve never loved email. AI has made me hate it more than ever. (I’m looking at you CoPilot).
The messages landing in my inbox keep getting longer. Many of them were obviously generated, not written. They’re bloated with fluff and junk, and the actual point is buried somewhere in the fourth paragraph, if there is one.
That’s the exact mistake I made in Guatemala, automated. The machine answers every possibility instead of the question.
We were handed a tool that could make every message sharper. Most people are using it to make messages bigger. I end up letting my AI answer their AI.
Long writing existed long before AI. Now it costs nothing to produce. The cost shows up on the other end, in the reader’s time.
Every time one of these lands, I wish I could send the sender a copy of a book I read on a flight last year. Without offending them.
The book I want to mail to half my inbox
The book is Smart Brevity, by the founders of Axios. Their argument is blunt. Most people scan instead of read, so write for the scanner you actually have, not the reader you wish you had.
A sign on the wall of their newsroom sums it up: “Brevity is confidence. Length is fear.”
Long writing usually means the writer hasn’t decided what they think yet. They pile up words and hope the reader will sort it out for them. The reader shouldn’t have to do the writer’s thinking.
Four lines are enough to start an article
What I like most about Smart Brevity is that you can use it before you write a single paragraph. The book builds everything on four parts. Each one maps onto an article.
Start with the tease. Six words or fewer, strong enough that you’d open it if you hadn’t written it. In an article, that’s your working title.
Then the lede. One sentence that says the most important thing. If the reader quits after it, they still got the point. In an article, that’s your opening, or very close to it.
Then why it matters. One or two sentences that tell the reader why this is significant to them. In an article, that’s the turn, the moment the reader decides to keep going.
Then go deeper. The stories, the evidence, the nuance. In an article, that’s the body. It’s only worth writing once the first three are settled.
Write those four lines before anything else. If you can’t write the lede, you aren’t ready to write the article. Fuzzy writing comes from fuzzy thinking, and no amount of polish fixes that.
The same four lines work with AI. Give a model your tease, lede, and why it matters before you ask for a draft, and it has a point to serve instead of a word count to fill.
A church historian taught me the same thing
Years after the Guatemala exercise, I took a doctoral seminar with a professor who had written lots of books on church history. I found his writing fascinating, which isn’t something people usually say about church history.
I asked him why his books sold so much better than other books on the same topics.
“My books are not boring. I write for the reader, not for academics.”
Then he got specific. He held himself to a strict maximum number of words per sentence and a strict maximum number of sentences per paragraph.
I don’t remember his exact numbers, but I remember they were much shorter than I expected, and I remember thinking there was no chance I could write that way.
Once he told me, I noticed it everywhere in his work. His books were so much easier to read than most academic textbooks.
Two mentors. One in a hotel room in Guatemala, one in a doctoral seminar. Same lesson. Write for the reader.
Every extra word spends someone else’s time
In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise. (Proverbs 10:19)
When I send a message, I’m spending the reader’s time, not mine. In faith work, many of the people we serve and serve alongside are reading in a second or third language, on a phone, in the middle of something else.
A bloated email doesn’t feel thorough to them. It feels like work.
Respecting someone’s time is a small way of loving them. I suggest everyone read Smart Brevity!
How many of your emails would survive Phil’s evaluation on the big screen?