Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Every extra sentence you write is a tax you charge someone else, without ever asking their permission first. Most writing advice is decoration sitting on top of that one fact. I want to show you the fact underneath the decoration.
Let me start by confessing something, because a confession is the fastest road to a point.
Years ago I gave a talk at Thammasat University here in Bangkok. It was to the Global Studies students, about writing, and about doing it well. Afterwards I wrote the whole thing up.
And I opened that piece with the most Thai sentence a Thai writer can produce. I said that none of this implies, in any way, that I write well.
One paragraph later I caught myself. And I wrote: well, fine, I think I do write well, and here are some tips.
Look at what just happened there. I went from false modesty to a plain claim in the space of two sentences. It took me about eighty words.
It should have taken zero.
The modesty was decoration. The claim was the fact. And every word spent performing humility was a word you paid for. You never agreed to that.
So let me say the idea cleanly.
When you write a sentence, somebody else has to read it. Reading costs time. Time is the one account nobody can refill.
So an extra sentence is not a neutral thing sitting harmlessly on a page. It is a small withdrawal from a stranger's life, taken without asking.
One sentence is nothing. Fine.
Now multiply it by every email you send. By every report. By every slide deck in every office on this planet. Throat-clearing becomes one of the largest unbilled expenses in the world.
Those students asked me how to write a great introduction. And I gave them a rule I had named after a real man.
Herzfeld's rule. Michael Herzfeld is a Harvard professor, and probably one of the most productive writers alive.
The rule goes like this. Whatever you have to say, you say it in the most concise and complete way, in the least time possible. Otherwise a man that busy would not have the patience to listen to you.
You can hear the joke inside it. Don't let the joke hide the machinery.
The rule works because it forces you to imagine your reader as someone whose time is genuinely expensive. Not your mother, who will read anything you write with love. Not your friend, who shares your context and forgives your detours.
A busy, brilliant person who owes you nothing.
Write for that person, and the padding dies on its own. You can feel their patience draining with every wasted clause.
And notice what the rule is really doing. It is not a style tip at all. It is an accounting identity.
It says the reader's attention is the scarce resource. Not your ideas.
Most people write as if the opposite were true. As if ideas were precious and attention were infinite.
So they wrap one small idea in layer after layer of preamble and qualification, the way you would bubble-wrap something fragile for the post.
But the idea was never the fragile thing. The attention was. And the bubble wrap is what kills it.
Now. A while after that lecture, I stopped writing long posts, and people asked where I had gone.
Here is what I was doing, in my own words from the time. I believe in the economy of words. I want to speak less, write less, and mean more.
I had started writing aphorisms. One line, sometimes two, trying to hold a whole thought.
And I went in expecting it to be easy. How hard could one sentence be, next to a two-thousand-word essay?
Guys. It was so much harder.
I wrote down why, while it was still hurting. For an aphorism to land, it has to be precise, and concise, and — most importantly — poetic.
A long post forgives you. There is always another paragraph to catch what the last one dropped.
An aphorism forgives nothing. Every word carries load. One loose word and the whole structure collapses.
Writing a single one took me minutes of typing and deleting. Typing and deleting. Sometimes I stopped halfway, because I could not stand to look at what I had made.
And that taught me the thing I most want to hand you tonight.
Compression is not a trick you perform on a sentence. It is a test the sentence performs on you.
When you cannot make it shorter, one of two things is true. Either it is finished, or you do not understand it yet.
Usually the second one.
Because the fat in your writing is not a language problem. It is the exact outline of the parts of your own thinking you have not done.
You hedge where you are unsure. You repeat where you do not trust the point to stand alone. You decorate where there is nothing underneath.
Show me a bloated paragraph and I will show you, with unkind precision, where its writer stopped thinking.
I know this because every bloated paragraph I have ever cut was a place where I stopped.
A student once asked me what the most important part of an essay is. My whole answer was six words. The question, and how you answer it.
That is the essay. Everything else is scaffolding, and scaffolding comes down once the building stands.
Now the brutal part, and I will give it to you the way it actually goes.
Cutting hurts. That sentence you have to delete is not a stranger's sentence. It is yours. You made it. It has a nice rhythm. Deleting it feels like losing something you paid for.
Which is exactly backwards.
You are not losing anything. You are refusing, finally, to charge the reader for it. The cost is yours either way. The only question is whether a stranger pays it too, forever, every time the thing is read.
So don't tell me you have no time to write short. Writing short is the time. The long version is the draft.
An old line goes like this. Somebody apologises for writing such a long letter, because there was no time to write a short one. Half a dozen famous writers get the credit, so I will not pretend to know whose it is.
But the accounting in it is correct. Brevity is not the absence of effort. Brevity is where the effort went.
Now the applied part. And you know my terms by now. I will help you, but you do the first rep yourself, tonight — not someday.
Tomorrow, take one thing you are about to send. One email, one message, one slide.
Before you send it, cut it by a third. Not polish. Cut.
A third is the honest tax rate on a first draft. The first draft always overshoots by about that much, and I say that as a man who writes every single day.
The first ten percent is easy. You cut the greetings, the hedges, the just circling back.
The next twenty percent will hurt, because now you are cutting sentences you like. Cut them anyway.
And pay attention to which ones scream. The sentence that screams loudest when you delete it is usually the pure decoration. It screams because it has nothing else to do.
Then watch what happens at the other end.
The reply comes faster. The question gets answered instead of skimmed. The meeting gets shorter.
People will start telling you that you are clear. They will mean it as a compliment about your writing.
But it was never about the writing. Clear writing is just clear thinking that agreed to be seen.
The economy of words is not a style. It is a form of respect. The decision that a stranger's ten seconds matter as much as your own.
And like most forms of respect, it gets repaid with interest.
Speak less, write less, mean more. Send the short version.