Excuse me for writing such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one. The obligatory citation for talking about concise writing is often attributed to Mark Twain (famous for his humorous and penetrating quips), but in truth it comes from Blaise Pascal: Je n'ai fait cette lettre-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
Roy Peter Clark gives excellent advice on learning to write short, effective texts. And we’re not talking only about advertising, emails, text messages or microblogging. Famous literary example: Hemingway’s 6-word novel, which Wired magazine used as a pretext to challenge other authors to give it a try. Here is a link to the rules followed by old Ernest. The genre of brevity is flash fiction: texts of 1,000 words or less. Some good suggestions on the topic can be found at Flash writing. The post you are now reading is 974 keystrokes, 171 words, including this.
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