Allison’s Book Corner: July 2025 – Smart Brevity

Short, Not Shallow

The authors emphasize the need to be concise.

• It’s the best way to make sure you’re understood.
• It values the reader’s time.

We’re not talking about omitting important facts, oversimplifying, or dumbing down your message. But it does mean sharpening your thinking and cutting through the noise to get to the heart of your message—then only sharing that.

Why it matters

“You can’t rally people around a strategy or an idea if they don’t understand what you’re saying.” By keeping your writing short, “you bring more soul and salience” by being direct, helpful, and timesaving. The authors encourage us all to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of too many words and distractions because long documents waste people’s time.

Audience First

The authors observe:

Don’t “hide the good stuff in piles of words.” Don’t make people deduce what you’re trying to say; just blurt it out. “Don’t be fancy—be effective.”

What might change in your world if you adopted this style?

Why it matters

“If you think about serving your audience first, …you will naturally cut down on waste. This might seem simple, but it’s where most people go off the rails. We tend to think too much about what we want to say versus what people want to hear.”

How To Do It

I hope you feel I’ve used those three rules in that graphic ⬆️ and throughout this article! 😊

Your Call to Action

I’ll let the authors give you their call to action directly from the book: “If there is one thing you take away from this book, it is this: Learn to identify and trumpet ONE thing you want people to know.”

When we read, we usually skim, scanning to answer two questions:

So, when you write your next memo, email, report, or policy, make sure you identify (1) what the document is, and (2) why it’s worth the reader’s time.