Brevity: Your New Best Friend

One of my favorite columnists in Peggy Noonan. I don’t necessarily agree with everything she says, but I sure do appreciate her writing style. Years ago, I learned from a wise colleague (thanks again, Nick Crews, wherever you are) that one could glean a lot from the first paragraphs of most front page stories of The Wall Street Journal. His point: good writing can beget good writing. Eventually, I got beyond the front page and in the last few years found Ms. Noonan. She writes with so much humanity and her observations seem so clear of the filler that, unfortunately, gums up some other writing.
    Anyway, in her piece in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal (“To-Do List: A Sentence, Not 10 Paragraphs), she remarked, “Something seems off with our young president.” She goes on to tell us that people are growing somewhat skeptical of him. Then she writes, “You can say this is due to a lot of things, and it probably is, most especially the economy . . . But I think at bottom his problems come down to this: The Sentence. And the rough sense people have that he’s not seeing to it.”
    Then she shares this treasure: a pithy line by Clare Boothe Luce who said, 1962, to her pal John F. Kennedy, “ . . . a great man is one sentence. The problem, suggests Noonan, is that the Obama White House is using too many sentences. As publicists, we should pay attention.
    I’ve been writing about the gift of brevity for a long time. This is especially true for pitching. No, not every email I send to the media contains one sentence. In fact, that never happens. But I do try to keep the number of paragraphs in each pitch to a minimum. Too often, we convince ourselves that less isn’t really more. How could it be? But truly, if you can imagine a reporter’s deadlines and all the other pressures building up over a week or a month, whatever, those extra lines can mean the difference between the recipient hitting the delete button and moving it to a “read later” folder. I’m always going to hope for the latter.
    So, even if we can’t really limit our messages to one sentence that should certainly be the goal. Take this lesson from Ms. Noonan and you’ll probably be a little closer:
    “Mr. Obama cannot replace his sentence with 10 paragraphs, and he can’t escape it, either. Because history dictated it. History wrote it. ‘He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror.’ Sentences don’t really get better than that. He should stop looking for a better one. There isn’t a better one.”