If brevity be the soul of wit...

People sometimes say I am wordy. I paged back through some earlier blogs and regret to report that they are right! I guess I forgot the old adage: “God gave us two ears and one mouth so that we would listen twice as much as we speak.”

I was reminded of this when reading a recent story in the Atlantic by one of my favorite writers, Nicolas Carr. The article, “Is Google Making us Stupid,” suggests that we have lost our capacity for reading lengthy, nuanced articles as we have become accustomed to assimilating information in easily digestible form. We like our oral communication in sound bites, our written communication in bullet points. We’ll watch an hour-long Powerpoint presentation with rapt attention, but listen to a 20 minute speech? Never!

As the world becomes “googilized,” people are reading less and absorb information differently. It would be easy to assume that this is a generational phenomenon, that while Gen X-ers under 25 might be comfortable with bits and bites and rest of us are still happy to read epic novels like War and Peace, thank you very much! Sadly, that is not the case. When an email comes in that’s very long, I often put it aside or print it for later. Sometimes I forget about it. I’m sure others do the same. The long and short of it: It is better to be brief, and have somebody listen or read what we say, than wordy and lose our audience altogether.

We could fight against the tide and continue to write lengthy missives to each other. Or we could recognize the need to adapt to our customers and colleagues and change the way in which we communicate. I think we need to adapt. My recommendation: In our emails and other communications we must:

Use bullet points, wherever possible
Keep paragraphs and sentences short
Summarize information

I have recently reminded my colleagues at MXenergy that we need to apply these lessons not only internally but in all of our communications, including:

• Emails and letters to customers
• Advertising copy
• Website copy

Btw, I hope you’ll forgive the FYI. For now, g2g.