Balancing Brevity and Verbosity in Business Communications
Brevity is valuable when audiences lack time or inclination—use elevator pitches for executives, SWOT matrices for pros and cons, and keep emails short. Verbosity is appropriate when responding to explicit requests for detail, providing supporting data in appendices, or keeping stakeholders informed during incidents.
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do,” proclaimed Thomas Jefferson a few centuries ago. Succinctness seems more valuable in the 21st century, where we’re bombarded by words in spoken and written forms. However, knowing *how *to be brief is no less critical as knowing when to be brief.
I generally recommend assuming that the audience lacks the time or the inclination to pay full attention to your communication. Some rules of thumb for being brief:
- Use the elevator pitch approach when presenting to executives
- Describe pros and cons of a situation using a SWOT matrix
- Strive to avoid email messages longer than a paragraph
- Finesse you brevity skills by participating in Twitter discussions
- Keep security policies short and to the point
- When in doubt, include fewer topics in a presentation
While the advice above might apply to many situations, there are certainly cases where being verbose is preferred:
- Provide details when responding to a person who explicitly asked for more information
- Include the necessary supporting figures and data in an appendix to a report
- Keep the public appraised of the situation when handling an incident, such as a data breach
- Offer detailed feedback when seeking to change the behavior of colleagues or other people around you
- Include lots of superfluous, unnecessary or otherwise redundant words when trying to reach the minimum length requirement for your article
The biggest culprit in long-winded communications are, perhaps, presentations that last an hour but feel much longer. I was interested to learn about an approach to presentations that caps the presenter’s time at just a few minutes. It can be harder to prepare for and present a short “lightning” talk than a longer one. Hand-picked related posts: