“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
In 1657, Blaise Pascal apologised to a correspondent: he had written a long letter because he had not had time to write a short one. The line has survived for 350 years because it points to something lasting: brevity is not an absence of content. It is the result of work. That work has become more visible in a time when language models can deliver long, polite, error-free emails in seconds. When length is free, length stops signalling effort. The long email no longer says “I took great care” – more often it says “I haven’t made up my mind”. The recipient feels the difference immediately: the long email delegates the thinking to the person who reads it.
Precision is a decision, not a style
A short email is short because the sender has made some choices that the long email postpones: What is the one thing the recipient needs to know? What is the one thing the recipient needs to do? And what can be left out, even though it is correct? The last is the hardest. Most of what fills long emails is not wrong – it is simply not necessary. Background, caveats, layers of politeness, three possible scenarios. All of it accurate. None of it driven by the recipient’s needs. Precision costs most when space is scarcest, because every word must earn its place – and because what gets cut must be cut by someone who understands why it could be spared.
That is why, in my experience, the short email is also a leadership tool. It shows that the sender has done the work: prioritised, decided, taken ownership of the conclusion. Not by writing less – but by finishing the thinking first.
An editing method in three steps
I use a simple method that works whether the first draft is your own or the machine’s – I have previously described what happens when the machine writes first:
1. Write long without shame. The first draft is allowed to be too long. Its job is to get all the material out, not to be finished. The decision about what to cut can only be made once you can see what is there.
2. Find the sentence that is the email. Somewhere in the draft sits the sentence the whole message exists for. It often hides in the third paragraph. Move it up to the first line. If it is not there, the problem is not length – it means the sender does not yet know what the message is.
3. Delete everything that does not serve that sentence. Every remaining paragraph must pass one test: does it help the recipient understand or act on the first line? If not, it goes – however well phrased it is. Whatever is important but does not belong here gets its own email or its own meeting.
The method takes five minutes. They are five minutes the sender spends instead of passing the work on to the recipient.
Simplicity is a result
Perhaps the short email is really a small test of something larger: the ability to decide what matters and stand by it. The questions it raises reach beyond the inbox: Where in our communication do we delegate the thinking to the recipient? What would happen if the first line of every message were the conclusion? And do we remind each other that editing is a professional skill – not an afterthought?
Sources
- Blaise Pascal: Les Provinciales, 16th letter (1657) – “I have made this letter longer only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
