The Beauty of Brevity

Concise writing is studied by scholars, but it doesn’t take a degree to lose interest or conversely, experience satisfaction from a succinct statement. I’ll never forget my editing professor praising Twitter for its 140-character limit. He said more good writing comes from those limitations than from having all the characters in the world available. I wonder what he would say about Twitter testing a new 280-character limit.

Aliza Rosen, Twitter Product Manager, reminded users that “Twitter is about brevity,” in a company blog post published on Tuesday, September 26. She went on to say, “We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too.” The blog post explains that the character limitation appears to be too restrictive for English and the added freedom could attract more Tweets.

Let’s cut to the chase. Twitter wants more business. I can respect that.

Managing five social media accounts with about ten pages for a city of 229,000 residents, I use Twitter every day and you better believe I exceed the word count every time I draft a Tweet. However, once I’ve cut the fluff and changed every “and” to “&,” I like that post a lot more than its Facebook equivalent. Will I still like it more when I have extra characters? (Will I still intentionally be brief?)

Twitter has established an interesting platform. It forces users to speak to their audience the way the audience wants to be spoken to. Blame it on today’s society, culture, what have you, we like quick and to the point.

Think about YouTube. Today, as of September 28, one of the top trending videos is “73 Questions With Zac Efron” by Vogue. If we set aside the name brand, stunning picture quality, Zac Efron’s house, and Zac Efron, we are left with a format that appeals to our need for speed. Questions are shot off to which Zac answers in a quick and interesting fashion. It’s fast, it’s fun and its brevity keeps us engaged during the full nine minutes and two seconds…okay only one minute and 40 seconds for me, but with eight seconds being the perceived average attention span for viewers (less than a goldfish), I’d say Vogue is killing it.

Please note, I didn’t check YouTube before writing this piece. I relied on popular demand to prove my point. I selected this video among the top trending, because it received two million views in 24 hours. Make that two million and one. Popular videos, books, ads, ect. owe their success to how well they feed our hunger for instant gratification…sorry about the loaded language. That’s another thought for another day.

So what’s the point? Brevity is beautiful. Whether or not Twitter decides to loosen its grip on that concept will not change the power of pithiness. It’s something I intend to keep implementing in my writing and I hope you will too.