Brevity
To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points. Here’s a trivia question for you: who wrote this passage? Perhaps you think it was written by a time-pressed professor, someone who would prefer journal articles to be lean and trim rather than long and baggy, someone who feels that word limits have become too generous in outlets like Organization Studies (max. 13,000 words) and Academy of Management Annals (max. 25,000 words). Or perhaps you think it was written by the type of scholar who loves to post on LinkedIn about the latest academic brouhaha, such as the overreaction on social media to a funny-sounding PhD dissertation or The Economist ’s recent finding that academic work has gotten harder to read over the last eighty years. But you’d be wrong. The correct answer is Winston Churchill. In the summer of 1940, a few months a...