Make It Count: An Exercise In Succinctness For The Information Age

Had Twitter been around during Hemingway’s literary reign, he would have been proud. Perhaps he might have even used it as a benchmark for literary musings and rants. If anyone could have conveyed a thought or expression into 140 characters, it would have been Papa.

We live with information overload. Almost everyone with something to say keeps a blog and posts their thoughts to social media. Twitter could be our info-glut saviour.

I believe in quality over quantity. A tweet’s limits are exactly what we need, but there’s still the matter of how many we’re allowed on any given day. Currently there is no limit, but I think there should be. If we were each imposed a limit of say, ten tweets per day, we’d take more time to craft each one. We’d ponder every letter, every word before publishing it. This would greatly reduce the constant vertical stream of information on our computer screens and mobile phones.

I follow a number of people that I consider valuable because of what they share, but more importantly because of their personal insights. When you follow hundreds, even thousands of people, it becomes too much. There’s a belief that the more you post on social media channels the more likely you’ll get noticed. This is true, but it’s playing a game of quantity and quality on parallel fields. Frankly, it’s too much.

So, where am I going with this? The message I want to convey is that succinctness is more important than ever. Get the point across quickly, effectively, and efficiently.

Treat every sentence as if it were a tweet, every blog post as if it were imposed with a ten tweet maximum. Make it real, make it count.