Brevity Is Beautiful | Hacker News Reader

Brevity Is Beautiful

betterexplained.com

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Brevity is not an end in itself but simply one goal of good writing. This means: don't pad, don't over-elaborate, don't meander. Keep your writing focused for its purpose.

But, if that purpose is, for example, to explain the meaning of restricted stock and, as a lawyer, you tell a client that such stock is granted but made subject to repurchase at cost upon termination of a service relationship between the company and the recipient, creating a risk of forfeiture and thereby requiring that an 83(b) election be filed so as avoid having artificial income imputed to the holder as vesting occurs, that is a perfectly fine if windy way to express oneself and creates no difficulty or misunderstanding for the reader (at least I hope not). There is room for variety in writing, and no writer should feel handcuffed by an artificial need to keep things brief.

That said, by all means be brief where you can, and do aim for brevity as a worthy goal of your writing. Just don't obsess about it. It has its place. That is all.

Overall, a very nice piece.

The purpose of "good writing" is clear communication. Attempts at brevity, done properly, result in removing fluff and unnecessary details, leaving the key points intact and making them the clear focus. Done improperly, they result in incomplete or mangled communication, with key points missing or inadequately explained.

Be brief, but clear.

@grellas, @lotharbot, great points. Yep, the goal of writing is to communicate an idea -- brevity is a tactic.

I love this quote by Einstein: Things should be as simple as possible, but not more so. If something is truly necessary, then keep it, but be strict about what is needed.

I've always been a fan of trying to organize my writing with several levels of complexity embedded. For example, when writing any sort of FAQ or explanation, I would briefly outline the steps, and then proceed to explain each one in further detail so that a lay audience may understand. This way both someone who's just looking to grasp or relearn an idea and someone who is very new to the topic can benefit. Either way, you're making assumptions about the level of minimum expertise of your audience.

Agreed -- good communication is about understanding your audience and circling back into detail as needed. Aka, do a breadth-first sweep, vs. depth-first.

The primary quality of prose style is clarity while brevity in an exposition ideally has these three qualities:

  * Context
  * Relevance
  * Cogency

Great point. I wonder, though: does first focusing on brevity bring natural clarity, or the reverse?

Focusing on clarity will naturally bring brevity, in those instances where it is appropriate. Saying something as plainly and simply as possible, while not being couched in padding, is typically the most clear and most brief way to say a thing.

A concise summary. Clarity is a state all humans strive for, reach for clarity in your writing and lucid expression will be a natural by-product.

Thought experiment: you see two reference books, one at 100 pages and the other at 200. Do you wonder if the smaller book could be concise and well-written, or do you immediately assume "bigger is better" and reach for the tome?

Seriously, people do this? What is wrong with them? I'd try to imagine every justifiable reason to buy the 100 page one. Padded technical writing deserves its own level of hell.

Agreed -- a recent blog post on HN (I can't seem to find it now) mentioned how an author had to turn a 500-page book into a 700-page one to make it seem "authoritative".

This thinking basically games our heuristics -- if all else is equal (which is never the case), then the longer book has more useful content. And given the way we're conditioned in school, a 20-page paper must be more valuable/important than a 5 page one.

Obligatory: http://i.imgur.com/RzRcw.jpg

And, if giving direction to a newcomer - I'd pass her the slimmer volume 9 times out of 9.

For an article on brevity, I found this to be a bit to drawn out.

This is the next article I read, http://venturefizz.com/blog/how-pitch-investor-90-seconds and in comparison, this is a great example of brevity.

It's punch, quick, and gets to the point.

I debated the irony of having an essay on brevity that wasn't short. But, I realized my goal was to have (hopefully) several meaningful thoughts, vs. a single short one. These are basically the thoughts / fears that go through my head when I think about what brevity is and why it's resisted.

That said, brevity is always an asymptotic ideal we're aiming for.

"The unix command line ('cat foo.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn') is wonderfully concise and powerful". And yet, contrary to the author's assertion, it can be made even more concise without sacrificing the power:

sort foo.txt | uniq -c | sort -rn

Thanks for the comment. Yeah, in this case I decided to keep the "superflous" cat because it offers more flexibility/readability -- i.e., what if you want another command before the first sort? With the 2nd version you have to remove foo.txt and type your command, instead of just inserting "mycommand |" where needed (and what if mycommand doesn't accept a file, just stdin, then you need the cat anyway).

But it's a good point, and there's a balance between the absolute minimum and flexibility. At one extreme you have code golf, at the other you have an abstract FactoryFactory.

"Brevity is the soul of wit" - William Shakespeare

And Shakespeare had florid language like no other, so that's a funny counterpoint.

It was florid but with a purpose. But it wasn't brevity.

This is absolutely true; especially, I find, here on HN where my concise, clear comments tend to go down better.

(and, yes, this is deliberately concise :))

...and down it went (I did not mod you down, by the way :)

I'm not sure why it was down voted. It's actually true (from my observation)

Linking to K&R and calling it "Introduction to C" is a bit sloppy and worth editing, it really threw me off track.

Whoops, my mistake! Just updated.

In the spirit of brevity: great article!

Thanks! :)

Most of the time.

Has nobody noticed that the best, most vivid, most engaging, most loved authors were not the briefest?

Mark Twain. Shakespeare. Joyce. Toni Morrison. Gladwell. Ackerman. Etc.

It's true that brevity is better than futile padding. But brevity itself shouldn't be a goal, unless you give up and admit up front that you're a terrible writer, and brevity is the best way to make your writing go from terrible to palatably mediocre.

Yeah, I think "brevity" isn't the perfect word because it seems to imply shortness. I mean it to be more of making every word tell, which I think those writers do.

No offense, but what's the point then of regurgitating William Zinsser badly? He said it better than you ever could.

If you really think brevity is important, read:

"On Writing Well"

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