Say less

I started this column in August but had trouble wrapping it up. It seemed adrift. The hook I needed finally fell in my lap last week when French writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize in literature, hailed for the economy of her prose.

“She always found a way to capture in one sentence what I couldn’t say in a page,” said French thinker Didier Eribon. Arnaux has compared her use of language to a “knife” and her prose as “brutally direct.” The Nobel committee praised her for the “clinical acuity” of her personal storytelling, “plain language scraped clean.” Another writer praised her for eschewing the “pretty sentences” that define much of today’s most celebrated fiction. Her books are short, too.

If a Nobel laureate can be clear, direct, and succinct, why can’t we?

Too often in business communications we say too much. And we say it too obliquely. Or try too hard to be clever.

Yet one reason you’re reading this is the brevity of the title. It works. Go to a news site, scan the headlines, and notice which ones catch your eye. Less is more.