Let Your Words Be Few

Why Brevity Is Harder Than You Think

I spent years editing technical documentation for enterprise software companies. The first time I actually practiced Let Your Words Be Few as a deliberate discipline, it took me three hours to rewrite a one-page memo that I'd originally drafted in twenty minutes. That was roughly 2014, and I still remember the exact moment it clicked for me. The principle itself isn't complicated. It means stripping every sentence down to its functional core before you consider it finished. But the execution is where most people fail. They confuse brevity with bluntness, and end up producing writing that's short but unreadable. That's not the same thing at all.

How to Actually Practice Let Your Words Be Few

Start by writing your draft the normal way. Get the ideas down. Then come back with a second pass dedicated entirely to deletion. Not revision. Deletion. Go through every paragraph and ask yourself what each sentence is actually doing. If two sentences are saying the same thing, cut one. If a sentence can be replaced by a single word, replace it. Here's the part nobody tells you: you'll need to cut more than you expect. In my experience, the first draft of any technical document contains roughly 40 to 60 percent disposable words. That includes filler phrases like "it is important to note that" and "as previously mentioned." Remove them and the document gets sharper without losing any information. I learned this the hard way on a project where I was writing API documentation for a payment processing system. The original spec was 87 pages. My revised version was 34. Developers actually thanked me. That doesn't happen often in this field.

Common Mistakes That Ruin Concise Writing

The biggest mistake I see people make is over-pruning. They cut so aggressively that they remove necessary context. A sentence might look redundant in isolation but provides crucial framing when placed next to another sentence. The trick is learning to distinguish between genuine redundancy and structural support. Another frequent error is assuming that short sentences automatically mean good writing. They don't. A choppy document with short but vague sentences is worse than a longer one with precise, information-dense prose. The goal isn't minimum word count. It's maximum signal per word. I ran into a specific edge case once while working on incident response procedures for a SaaS platform. We had a standard template that required every step to be written in imperative mood, no exceptions. When I tried to apply strict brevity principles, I ended up with instructions that were technically correct but ambiguous in edge cases. The workaround was to keep the full procedural detail for the critical failure scenarios and compress only the routine steps. Brevity doesn't apply equally across all sections of a document. Know where to hold back.

The Tools and Techniques That Actually Help

There's no special software required, but a few habits make the process significantly faster. One is reading your draft aloud. Your mouth will stumble over wordy sentences before your eyes catch them. Another is setting a hard word limit before you start editing. If your original draft is 2,000 words and your target is 800, you immediately know you need to cut 60 percent. That forces you to be ruthless instead of making small tweaks. I also recommend the reverse outline method. After you finish your first draft, write a one-sentence summary of each paragraph. If you can't summarize a paragraph in one sentence, that paragraph is probably doing too much work or talking past its point. This takes about ten minutes for a medium-length document and usually reveals two or three paragraphs that should just be deleted entirely. The approach works across formats. Email, documentation, reports, presentations, code comments. The underlying discipline is the same: respect the reader's time by giving them only what they need, no more, no less.

When This Approach Fails

Let Your Words Be Few does not work well in contexts where relationship-building or persuasion is the primary goal. Legal contracts, marketing copy, and executive briefings for non-technical stakeholders often require more words to establish trust, clarify liability, or frame arguments. Compressing those documents too aggressively can backfire. You'll lose nuance that the audience actually needs to feel confident. It also breaks down in collaborative writing environments where multiple contributors add to the same document. If five people each write their own section without coordination, the result will be inconsistent even if each individual section follows brevity principles. You need a single pass of structural editing after the contributions come in. For those situations, I usually recommend the opposite direction: add clarity through structure rather than subtraction. Better headings, clearer signposting, consistent terminology. Sometimes the problem isn't that there are too many words. It's that the words aren't organized in a way that makes the document easy to navigate.

The principle itself is straightforward enough that you don't need a course or a book. You just need to practice it until it becomes your default instinct rather than something you consciously apply to every sentence. That takes time, but the return is immediate and measurable. Every document you write afterward will take less time to produce and less time for someone else to read.