June 2011
Beginner
226 pages
2h 51m
English
Idea 35: Be concise
Be brief, be sincere, be seated.
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt
If clarity, simplicity and vividness describe the quality of what you say, and truth, beauty and goodness determine the value of what you say, conciseness is about the quantity dimension.
Essentially, conciseness means brevity of expression. In an age conscious of the value of time – ‘time is money’, as US Founding Father Benjamin Franklin said – and of time management, long-windedness is a short-cut to losing the interest of colleagues as well as customers or clients.
Your ability to confine weighty matters to a relatively small space in time calls for almost surgical skills of thought. As the Arab proverb says, ‘Measure the cloth seven times before you cut ...
