The Art of Smart Brevity - Write Less, Say More | Jim VandeHei | TEDxOshkosh

[Music] so i've got some tough medicine for you the truth is that everybody in this room needs to radically rethink how you communicate especially how you write if you want anything to stick in this distracted digital world i don't care if you're a student if you're an academic if you're a scientist you're a ceo a manager i'll tell you what the data told me that your friends won't tell you which is almost nobody listens to or reads most of what you write most of the stuff that you agonize thinking about they pay no attention to

and how do i know this well i learned it the hard way i've dedicated my entire life to mass producing words i was i'm a journalist by training started at the oshkosh northwestern worked my way up to covering the presidency for the washington post and the wall street journal and i started to media companies all about mass producing words politico and now axios and at my current company the entire premise of the company is to teach journalists and then ceos academics and others how to use far fewer words so why why if i spent my

entire life writing lots of words so i want people to use fewer of them because the data and you made me if you actually look at what you're doing one of the most interesting things about technology one of the creepiest things about technology is businesses know so much about you what you do where you go what you buy and in the case of a media company how you consume information and the data about how you consume information is eye-popping and to be honest for me really humbling and led to this journey about wow if i'm

looking at this data and the data basically says you read almost nothing you skim you might look at a headline you might look at a subject line but you're basically not reading the stories in my case that we were producing in the most humbling moment the eye-opening aha moment for me i was a journalist i was at politico writing columns about president obama and we wrote this column and i looked at the traffic numbers and a million people had read the story and the white house had to respond to it and boy was i feeling

cool and smart until i looked at the data so back then you had to paginate pages online and so you had to click from one page to the next to keep reading and i looked at the data this was a 1600 word column that everyone in washington was talking about that had me feeling so confident and i realized almost nobody went past the first page it gets worse on one page there's only 450 words and i hid a lot of the good stuff at the end and so it turns out that people were responding sharing

talking about a story that almost nobody read and so it put me on this sort of this journey this discovery i'm like really like nobody reads anything is this true everywhere is it just me is there something about my writing so i called my friends at the new york times i called our friends at facebook i started to talk to academics and tried to figure out what what's going on here because i had a choice at this point i could give up on all of you i could give up on humanity i could give up

on my career or i could do what basically jeff bezos would do if he's trying to sell you a shoe or get you to buy a book which is what what is the data telling us what do you want what are you doing and that data was showing that one everybody was getting hit with more information than ever before and is perpetually distracted all because of the internet you skim you don't really read and you share stuff without even bothering to see what it actually means or what the story uh might say and if you

think about it the deeper i dug the more it actually made sense for people who are my age or older like once upon a time the iphone didn't exist the android didn't exist there was no facebook there was no google if you wanted to learn about something new you had to go to an encyclopedia you want to look up a word you went to a dictionary if you were waiting for news you had to wait for the evening news or the morning newspaper and then suddenly 2007 that period comes along and now all of us

had the opportunity to have a smartphone with astonishing capabilities to give us access to more information than at any point of humanity any idea we had anything we didn't know we could google it any idea we had no matter how stupid it was we could share it and not only could we share it we could find other people who would applaud who would follow us who'd fan us and suddenly oh my gosh like we've got all this access to mass information at scale and you could do this for free you could do this for free

so suddenly we're getting hit with all this information and i don't think our species was built to keep up with it i talked to a guy at the university of maryland who studied students for the last decade and he basically found that even when you choose to read something even when you make the choice that this is important you spend on average 26 seconds looking at it review.org and others have looked at how many times do you look at your screen in a day they found this at least 250 times you're checking your phone and

for those that don't think that's true think about how many times you've either checked it or thought about checking it since i started babbling our data shows that more often than not if you share a story on social media you never read it think about that like there's something about a headline or a photo that you're so jacked up that you're gonna share it like you're a little lemming and we all do it we all do it because our brains are being like flooded with information and what i thought when i did the discovery i

thought for sure the brain must be getting rewired and you hear that often there's very little scientific proof that that's true what happened and what we think is happening is as a species we've always been prone to distraction we think we're good multitaskers almost nobody is we're good at doing one thing if you're focused on it the university of california irvine studied this they studied our distractibility and found that if you get distracted on something it takes you 20 minutes to truly refocus now think about your day it's just a wash and distraction a wash

in words tweeted words texted words slacked words email words words words words and then you pick your little computer looking for more anymore anymore so no wonder nobody's paying attention to almost anything you're saying or doing no wonder it's so hard to get people to pay attention uh to anything so at axios as we thought about this and we said listen if the consumer's saying they want more information quicker and they're not going to spend that much time and you want to stay in journalism what would you do what would you do and our solution

was what we call smart brevity that you people want smart content essential content but they want it delivered efficiently as fast as humanly possible and we saw it in in how people were getting our information how they were getting it elsewhere and so we built a whole company around it to teach journalists how to do it and journalists kind of adapted right away and suddenly we had awesome readership almost overnight people in the white house ceos tech leaders and then the most two interesting things happened after that i started to get not 10 or 20

literally hundreds of notes from readers saying thank you you're trying to save me time i can tell i never ask for a thank you especially when you cover politics you're lucky not to get hit by a shoe much less uh like actually have someone thank you for it but i was like oh that is interesting then about a year and a half in we started to get calls from companies from the nba from startups and almost all were saying the same thing hey our executives are people they're reading smart brevity but they won't read anything

that we do internally this led me on another journey to figure out why like people can't get people to read about things that are happening at their company or happening at their school happening at their startup and it turned out that basically people were vomiting so many words in all these places that nobody was paying attention to it and that's where we thought smart brevity could work in almost any setting so we get a call from the cia the head of the cia they call us and they say listen can you guys come in and

talk to our team about how spies can essentially uh give a much more crisper explanation of what they're seeing on the ground like what are the threats they're not great communicators these messages are meandering so my partner goes in talks to the cia explains that the tricks and tips i'm going to give you in a second and in the audience is a guy who writes the presidential daily brief and this was under donald trump and he would write it go in and they would brief him and he was so enamored with this idea of communicating

more effectively that he quit and now works for us teaching other people how to communicate more effectively it's now i'm not blaming trump i'm blaming i'm telling him it's because of us because of axios uh around the same time jamie dimon one of the most famous ceos of our generation he writes his annual letter it's 32 000 words long about his observations on banking and on the world 32 000 words is basically a book so he's probably lucky if even his family members read it so his staff calls us and they say hey listen like

it seems like you guys are good at getting people to pay attention to information could you do a smart brevity version of it so we took his most important points turned 32 000 words into a couple hundred and voila they got much more engagement much more traction and people seeing what's important remembering what's important so what i want to leave you with are what are some of the basic tips because you probably know it you're you're frazzled you're distracted you can see it when you're trying to send a message like what are the things that

you could do differently starting today to become a vastly more effective communicator number one stop being selfish stop being selfish what do i mean by that so much of writing is self-indulgent we write about what we care about and we write at the length that we want to write about we don't think about the whole purpose of it which is what is the person that i'm writing this for or talking to what do they actually need to know what do they actually care about reverse the way you think about communicating at our company the first

two words of our manifesto are audience first how do you serve the people that you're trying to reach the holy father himself has blessed this concept indirectly so the pope francis just gave a speech it recently were in slovakia where he was talking to priests about the homilies that they're giving and he said you have to stop giving 30 and 40 minute homilies and they should be 10 minutes because no one's listening to you you're losing them people don't pay attention that long and he joked when he made the announcement that the loudest applause came

from the nuns because in his words they're the ones who have to suffer through your long-windedness so point two point two is grab me whenever you're communicating again i don't care if it's in an email if it's a tweet if it's a note if it's a a memo to a friend grab me what is the most important thing the reason you're writing what is that one thing if you only have that 26 seconds i mentioned what is the one thing you want me to remember about it which is related to tip three which is just

keep it simple keep it simple like take think of that one sentence like one sentence is better than two sentences one paragraph better than two paragraphs use simple strong words there's a reason you're taught a simple sentence structure when you're a little kid it still works effectively today it still works effectively keep it simple if you're going to write about a banana you're not going to call it an elongated yellow piece of fruit you're going to call it a banana if you're going to talk about someone lying you're not going to say prevaricate you're going

to say lie keep it simple which relates as well to point 4 which is be human write like a human i don't i see this in journalism all the time i don't understand what happened to our species that when you put a pen in our hand or a keyboard in front of us we suddenly stiffen up think we're a harvard professor or we're walt whitman and we try to show off in our writing like if i was talking to you in the bar i'm not going to use sat words i'm not going to talk in

acronyms i'm not going to use wordy clauses i'm going to talk like i'm talking to you now i'm going to talk like a human so stop stop using those big terms you think that people think you're smart when you use them they don't they just want to throw a shoe at you which leads me to point uh five which is just stop just stop the greatest gift that you can give yourself and others in this cluttered world is their time back it is your time back use as few words as few sentences as humanly possible

so that that person gets the message you want and you both get the time back that you deserve and i could tell you this i've seen it in my own life if you would if you just start to think about the efficiency of communication if you put into practice a couple of the tips that i just talked about you will see in your own mind that you start to think more clearly talk more clearly write more clearly and you'll see ultimately that it's selfishly good for you because you'll be hurt again thank you you