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 after he became Prime Minister and almost a year since Germany invaded Poland, Churchill issued a secret memo to his war cabinet entitled ‘Brevity’. In the memo, Churchill urges government officials to write clearly and concisely – a directive that he hoped would streamline communication in a time of crisis.

It’s probably an exaggeration to say that, for Churchill, what started with brevity in 1940 ended with victory in 1945. But it’s notable that, in the midst of the Battle of Britain, the military campaign that saw the Royal Air Force defend the skies against the Luftwaffe’s large-scale attacks, Churchill still found the time to disseminate style guidelines to government staff. 

Churchill’s advice is simple. He encourages his staff to avoid ‘the flat surface of officialese jargon’ in their reports and to write as plainly as possible, setting out the main ideas ‘in a series short, crisp paragraphs’. Always look for opportunities to cut words, he counsels: 

Let us have an end of such phrases as these: ‘It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…’, or ‘Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect’. Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational. 

Churchill’s recommendations are strikingly modern, and they wouldn’t be out of place in any style guide for academic writing. For sure, it’s advice worth heeding. As scholars, we too should strive for brevity in our own work, for writing that’s succinct without being abbreviated.

Brevity begins by shunning those empty phrases we use to puff up our academic sentences, phrases like ‘it is being argued here on the basis of the available evidence that certain types of grazing mammals are involved in a process of digestive rumination’. These kind of phrases, as Churchill recognized, get in the way of what we really want to say (‘cows chew cud’).

Brevity continues by cutting words that clutter up our prose, such as unnecessary adverbs (arguably, importantly, interestingly) and strings of prepositions (here, on, of, in). Let the nouns and verbs speak for themselves.

The stakes are lower for us than they were for Churchill in 1940. But his point is just as relevant today: disciplined writing is a byproduct of disciplined thinking. Brevity is a cardinal virtue for any author, so write short and sweet whenever possible. 

That’s easier said than done, of course. Having just been elected Prime Minister for the second time, Churchill issued a new memo to staff in 1951 – this time, with a tone of frustration:

Official papers are too long and diffuse. In 1940 I called for brevity. Evidently I must do so again. 

I feel your pain, brother.