SCOOP: Musk’s next move

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz, Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less. New York: Workman, 2022. 224 pp. $27.

Smart Brevity is neither smart nor brief.

The book, by the founders of Axios, offers a dumbed-down writing template that assumes an easily distracted reader: a six-word-maximum title or subject line, a strong single sentence (the “lede”), some context about why what you’re saying matters (the “nut graf”), and an invitation to go deeper. It’s the model behind Axios — though even Axios doesn’t observe a six-word limit for titles.

And because the reader is easily distracted, it’s necessary to write with bold text, bullet points, emoji, and illustrations. And only two or three sentences per paragraph, please. It all begins to sound like a recipe for gaining the attention of a defeated former president. And for gaining customers: an AI service called Axios HQ can evaluate your writing for you — or, really, for your company. Pricing starts at $12,500 a year.

At 224 pages, Smart Brevity is painfully repetitive: if you miss the first pronouncements that reading habits have changed but writing habits haven’t (uh, Twitter?) and that most people don’t read most of what’s put in front of them, fear not: you’ll find those pronouncements offered again and again. Indeed, you’ll find every idea repeated. Even anecdotes repeat. There are, to use the book’s language, “too many words.”

A far more helpful resource about writing for the world of work: Bryan Garner’s HBR Guide to Better Business Writing (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). Far broader in scope, far wiser about writing.

[This post’s title is a sample title from Smart Brevity, which recommends the use of “a hot name or brand” in a headline or subject line.]