If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

by curtis • 10 years ago

131 44 10 years ago

quoteinvestigator.com

daze42• 10 years ago

This comment intentionally left short.

syphilis2• 10 years ago

The shortest comment is no comment at all. :)

phillc73• 10 years ago

lb1lf• 10 years ago

As with a lot of witticisms, I guess just about every country attribute it to some native; in Norway, 'everybody' knows nobel laureate, author and bon vivant Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote this.

(That would have been sometime between, say, 1875 and 1910, though, so he quite possibly lifted it off one of the people mentioned in the article.)

dang• 10 years ago

The attribution to Pascal is as definitive as these things ever get. Quote Investigator just likes to present the case cautiously.

Artoemius• 10 years ago

An elucidating quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

"It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."

lostlogin• 10 years ago

This sort of attitude leaves us without headphone jacks on our phones.

JetSpiegel• 10 years ago

Nothing more to add while retaining functionality. Otherwise remove everything.

khedoros1• 10 years ago

Only if you get to the "nothing left to remove point", and then remove something else. It's best for something to be minimal, as long as it's not also insufficient.

ctdonath• 10 years ago

Wireless headphones are a thing for half of users now.

The example you're looking for, and everyone has properly forgotten about, is the short-lived "no UI" iPod Shuffle.

combatentropy• 10 years ago

Which is why Albert Einstein said it better: "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."

baddox• 10 years ago

Fine by me. I got that phone on release day, and the negativity about the jack removal has caused me much more annoyance than the removal itself.

curtis• 10 years ago

I really liked this quote by Woodrow Wilson:

“That depends on the length of the speech,” answered the President. “If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.”

maxxxxx2• 10 years ago

That's one thing I have learned at Toastmasters. You typically have 5-7 minutes but the first draft of most speeches is 15 or more. It's hard to let go of things you want to say but the results is always much better.

ghaff3• 10 years ago

There are exceptions, such as when the intent is to really dive deep on some topic (workshops and the like), but I generally find that keeping talks at conferences to 30 minutes or so, rather than the more typical 50 minutes plus Q&A, results in a better program. It forces people to focus on the key points they want to make and dispense with a lot of stage-setting or unnecessary detail.

Unfortunately, hour sessions are sort of the industry standard and a lot of people feel that it's not worth it to give a talk if they're not going to have 60 minutes.

r00fus• 10 years ago

Would not better presentations have taken 2 to 3 hours of content and condensed down to an hour?

eevilspock• 10 years ago

Ironically all of the source quotes cited in the article are much longer than "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".

I guess it took a century or two to whittle it down further.

sergio• 10 years ago

That's not ironic, it's congruent: every quoted person didn't have much time at the moment to make that sentence shorter either.

ticklemyelmo• 10 years ago

Perfectly applicable to software development. You can bang out a simple unoptimized program in tens or hundreds of lines of some scripting language (that compiles to megabytes of executable) in minutes. Doing the same thing in a highly optimized way with a minimal set of assembly instructions could take weeks or months.

tromp• 10 years ago

And even more applicable to code golfing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf

krylon• 10 years ago

This makes me think of a teacher I had in school - he told us we should try to keep our exams to about 600 words. Whereas students in other classes routinely wrote about 2000 words, sometimes 3000.

I first disliked him, because he meant business - my first exam with this teacher was about 1100 words, and he explicitly told me he would have given me a better grade if it had been shorter. (Boy, was I mad!)

But in time, I came to appreciate this attitude, because it forced me to really think about what I wanted to say and how to say it. And I suppose that is what Pascal referred to, as well. Thinking about what you want to say and boiling it down to the essentials takes time.

The upside is that, with a little practice, it helps one to focus and what is essential and strip it as bare as possible.

(As you can see, I have since forgotten that valuable lesson and reverted to my old rambling ways.)

eitally• 10 years ago

Your rambling was the result of providing context. You can be concise and clear when the reader is already knowledgeable. When that's missing, things get messy (witness any corporate email chain involving more than 3 people or 2 teams).

Lots of folks have resorted to footnotes, which isn't a bad tool at all, but it detracts from the core message Pascal was trying to relay: know your audience, and make sure each word is carefully selected to reinforce your message.

adrianratnapala2• 10 years ago

Eyeballing it, I think I could halve the length of his comment while sharpening the context-giving story. But krylon was probably right not to bother with that second, non-trivial pass.

ams6110• 10 years ago

Corporate email chains are wordy because everyone wants to mark his territory, or reinforce his relevance.

ghaff3• 10 years ago

I've long been a fan of footnotes. Alas, they often don't work well in electronic formats. But they are a good way to provide context, justification, or additional detail without breaking the flow.

KON_Air• 10 years ago

While I fully agree mastery of the subject is vital to be able to get your point across with less sentences and/or words, it really needs some time to go over the text to make it worth the label "concise", which just doesn't exist in an exam.

adrianratnapala2• 10 years ago

Maybe you forgot nothing: it's just that HN comments aren't important enough to condense.

Lordarminius• 10 years ago

As you can see, I have since forgotten that valuable lesson and reverted to my old rambling ways.

A superior way to close your argument. Have an upvote :)

Spooky23• 10 years ago

I got a crash course in this when I took a journalism class and a history class from a grumpy professor who required handwritten papers and would tear up anything that required two sheets.

Probably the single most important thing I did in college.

koenigdavidmj• 10 years ago

I thought it was Knuth who wrote something to this effect. Not so, but I stumbled onto another gem of his:

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

imh• 10 years ago

I often find myself writing something long, so I have to close it with a kind of wrap-up, "this is the point" statement. Then I immediately delete everything except for the wrap-up statement.

syrrim• 10 years ago

It isnt until you've fully understand your own point that you can easily explain it to someone else.

munificent• 10 years ago

The first draft is for me to figure out what I want to say.

The second draft is for me to say it.

The third draft is to fix all the mistakes I made in the second draft.

The fourth draft is to fix all the mistakes I missed in the third. Around here, it's finally good enough.

sea6ear• 10 years ago

I've always liked the scene in the movie version of "A River Runs Through it" where the father is teaching his son to write, and has him write an essay, then says "half as long", several times.

That has actually been one of the best reminders for me regarding my efforts at writing. Write and compress until the essential points remain.

If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)

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