44 pages • 1 hour read
Jim Vandehei, Mike Allen, Roy SchwartzSmart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Part 1, Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “What Is Smart Brevity?”
Introduction Summary: “The Fog of Words”
The authors use plural first person to begin the book, opening with a commentary on how words hold us all “prisoner” (6). They discuss the ways in which we are inundated by words, be it through emails or tweets, and the tendency that people have to use too many words when they could be communicating more succinctly. They provide some datapoints that highlight the attention span of readers and how the brain can distinguish in milliseconds whether or not to continue reading something. The authors also claim that the data show that readers scan rather than read electronic text. More data are presented that highlight how the consumption of written content has changed because of electronic forms of writing. The authors then ask, in a world overflowing with written content, how one can get their own writing noticed. Their answer is that writers should modify their approach to better align with the way readers consume written content.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Short, Not Shallow”
The authors provide their definition of smart brevity, describing it as a system designed to help writers communicate more clearly and concisely. They distinguish between short and shallow, suggesting that shorter does not mean less intelligent. They discuss their journalism background, noting that while they own a media company, the book is not intended only for journalists. They have a much wider target audience, which includes college students and CEOs alike. Broadly speaking, the book is generally for anyone tasked with communicating to a large audience. The authors anticipate skepticism on the subject, making clear that there is still a purpose for long-form writing and reading, such as can be found in fiction novels; the authors even encourage readers to both produce and consume such writing. However, they again return to their primary argument, stating that if the writer wants their content to stand out and be consumed in the digital world, then their strategy for smart brevity is the most effective way to make that happen.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Smart Brevity Explained”
The authors speculate that for many people, words tend to interfere with what is truly intended. They provide a brief account, which is boxed and set apart from the bullet point format thus far employed, of when Jim learned the value of terse writing while working for The Wall Street Journal. The authors argue that smart brevity is not a limiting strategy; instead, it can help improve writing. They mention that after launching Axios, many corporations and agencies came to them seeking advice on how best to communicate in writing in the digital age.
The authors delve into the nuts and bolts of the smart brevity strategy, identifying the “core 4” components: a “muscular ‘tease’” (24); a strong lede, which is the first sentence; context (why it matters); and an option to learn more, a choice that should be left to the reader. The authors urge writers to make sure that if the reader is going to invest their time, then the content should be worth their while. As part of this discussion, a graphic of a typical smartphone screen is used to demonstrate the “core 4.” The authors insist that all of these core components should fit into a single screen. They mention that they have used this core strategy to develop an artificial intelligence-powered tool that helps guide writers toward becoming more concise writers using the smart brevity strategy. Lastly, while smart brevity is a structural strategy, the authors insist that it allows space for improvisation and embellishment when necessary and liken the strategy to jazz music in this regard. The chapter concludes with three different samples of written communications, one of which is a hypothetical CIA report called the President’s Daily Briefing. In each case, the samples are broken down into the four components, with a before and after comparison so the reader gets a sense of how the revision is much more concise and stripped of all filler.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Road to Smart Brevity”
The authors discuss how they ended up starting Axios. Allen and VandeHei were once journalists for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. When the internet began to really take hold in daily life, they soon realized, much to their chagrin, that most readers were not actually reading more than a few hundred words of their long stories. For his part, Schwartz worked as a polling consultant for Gallup and, like his co-authors, frequently composed long-winded PowerPoints that he felt wasted the audience’s time.
Borrowing an approach from Nicholas Johnston at Bloomberg, the trio began Politico. On realizing the high demand for bite-sized chunks of news, they then started Axios in 2017. Their formula now gives readers only what readers need to know, and it also allows those readers to decide for themselves whether to read the long versions of the stories.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Audience First”
The title of this chapter consists of the first two words of the manifesto for Axios. The authors argue that when composing a written communication, the writer should consider their audience as specifically as possible instead of choosing to write what they, as writers, want to articulate or what matters to them. The authors swivel toward another anecdote of a preacher who, when asked by a youth how one can be sure to always do the right thing, responded, “All you can do is the next right thing” (45). The preacher could have prattled on and on about this loaded question, yet instead he chose to offer a concise answer. The answer, despite being short enough to be memorable, was profound. Such features are what the authors favor in writing. The authors insist that television does the opposite, instead loading plotlines with filler.
The authors again advise writers to consider the target audience. They suggest seeking some peer review by asking someone else to interpret the main point of a composition. The idea is that the peer is likely to identify the main idea right away. The authors also urge people to avoid beating around the bush. They assert that oftentimes, especially in tense situations, people tend to embellish their comments so that they soften the blow. The authors suggest that this kind of indirect communication style hides one’s insecurity. They reference Lisa Ross, the CEO of Edelman, an international public relations firm, noting that Ross encourages people to be direct and say what they mean. If someone isn’t getting to the point, she won’t listen. Ross views indirect communication as an assault on her time. The chapter concludes with a series of “tips and tricks” that synthesize the chapter’s content into actionable steps.
Introduction-Part 1, Chapter 4 Analysis
This opening section of the book situates the need for smart brevity in the authors’ perception of the world, immediately introducing the theme of Cutting Through the Noise With Punchier Writing. The authors dedicate substantial energy to portraying words, especially in the digital age, as a source of confusion and stress. They paint a visual of humans constantly expelling words in unflattering ways: “Never in the history of humanity have we vomited more words in more places with more velocity” (6); “We know everyone has less time, more options, endless distractions—yet we keep coughing up the same number of words” (8); and “Most people think about what they want to say and then pollute and dilute it with mushy words” (20). Citing several findings from “[e]ye-tracking studies” and “[b]ehavioral research” (6-7), for which they do not provide details of authorship or further context, the authors add that humans have “always been prone to distraction. It’s just that now we are getting slapped silly with an explosion of minute-by-minute distractions” (7). The “Big Picture” is that everyone is “wallowing in noise and nonsense most of our waking hours” (8), trying to operate in what the authors term a “fog of words.” The authors, in turn, attribute this situation to two things: first, the internet and smartphones, and second, people’s outdated communication style, which allegedly resembles “the same way we have been writing for generations” (8).
The internet’s impact on human attention is well-documented, but Smart Brevity does not offer evidence to confirm that “word fog” is truly the main problem of reader attention; in other words, it is not quite clear that lengthy writing, specifically, is the greatest challenge to overcome in the digital era in order to gain readers’ attention. The authors also do not provide evidence to confirm that writing in the past (any time prior to 1980) was always or even generally lengthy and verbose. Instead, the authors employ their own stated method, making sweeping claims about truth without providing context or nuance. Though the presentation of statistics suggests the presence of evidence, lack of critical analysis of those numbers and how they fit into the book’s claims and broader thesis is absent. As a result, there’s an unstated assumption at work throughout the book that is alluded to in the theme of Cutting Through the Noise With Punchier Writing: Attention is a more important aspect of reader engagement than understanding.
The authors’ insistence on “short, not shallow” belies the main risk of smart brevity, namely that it may lead to writing that lacks context, nuance, and subtlety. The authors are clear, in their opening chapter, that as writers themselves, they have a specific audience in mind: “We run a media company. We live, breathe and make money off words and getting the most influential, demanding readers to consume them—CEOs, political leaders, managers and curious news junkies” (13). This statement helps solidify the strongly present theme of The Business Benefits of Smart Brevity. However, their criticisms of lengthy writing are often more generalized, largely due to the lack of context generally present in the book. Producing lengthy writing is associated with “vomiting” and “coughing [something] up” (6-8). Even in the first chapter, which aims to address this concern directly, the authors insist they are “not arguing that there’s no time for indulging in words” (16); this phrasing alone suggests that reading anything not written with smart brevity is an “indulgence” and a luxury—not a necessity.
The authors also argue for the value of smart brevity by attempting to frame it as inherently moral. While writing longer pieces is selfish, applying smart brevity is selfless. Writers who do not use smart brevity are “meandering and self-centered […] Boring and burdensome” (20-21). Using more words suggests, per the sign in the Axios newsroom, “fear” and, per Lisa Ross, “insecurity” (50). To use smart brevity is to accommodate readers and accept reality: “Adapt to how people consume content—not how you wish they did or they did once upon a time” (10). The words from Lisa Ross are especially telling in this sense, with the authors noting her observation “that a silver lining of COVID is ‘my time means everything to me’” (50). The implication, echoed elsewhere in the book, elevates smart brevity to a concept that doesn’t merely respect readers’ busy schedules but responds to readers’ mortality, providing them with the precious resource of time.
Notably, this first section of the book suggests that the authors’ priority is profit, which the authors gain via clicks and readers’ time spent on articles. For example, as the authors make a more specific case for smart brevity beyond penetrating the “fog of words,” they lean heavily on their personal career experience. The internet and its online tracking systems gave writers, journalists included, access to new data that could reveal how much of a text readers were actually reading. The authors describe how startling they found these results: “The web offered something newspapers never did: actual data on who was reading what. […] Most people read our headlines, and some read our first few paragraphs. But it was often only friends and family who read the whole thing” (36). The authors’ language around effective writing, in turn, often emphasizes its “stickiness” or ability to attract attention: The term “memorable” occurs multiple times in relation to the concept of words echoing out. The authors assume that what writers want is for their writing to “stick in the digital world” (16). In this section, the first chapter insists that smart brevity should not mean writing “short for short’s sake” (16), and throughout the book, the authors associate smart brevity with morality in several ways. The authors’ priority being profit would not necessarily rule out their other claims. However, profiting off online political writing is a more specific aim than the broader aim the book claims to have: that is, to improve all communication in general.
