{"id":33854,"date":"2023-06-28T07:06:55","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T07:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open-up.ch\/it-pays-to-be-brief\/"},"modified":"2023-07-06T14:41:30","modified_gmt":"2023-07-06T14:41:30","slug":"it-pays-to-be-brief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open-up.ch\/en\/it-pays-to-be-brief\/","title":{"rendered":"It pays to be brief"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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28.06.2023|<\/p>\n

It pays to be brief<\/strong><\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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If you master the art of keeping a topic short and presenting a complex issue so that even a layperson can understand it, you\u2019ll never get bored and you\u2019ll reach your goal faster. This is just as true for companies as it is for politicians and communications consultants. <\/strong><\/p>

During my studies, friends said I had the urge to simplify things and always get to the point. They were at pains to explain that the world was much more complex than I could imagine and had to be looked at in a differentiated way. I let the criticism wash over me. I am who I am, and I went my own way: the way of simplification. It was a decision I was not to regret.<\/p>

I didn\u2019t know that I had a prominent ally in the form of William Shakespeare. In his opinion, getting to the point was a good thing. More than 400 years ago, he had one of the characters in Hamlet opine that \u201cbrevity is the soul of\u00a0wit<\/a>.\u201d What Shakespeare meant was that intelligent people can express something with few words. Back then, \u201cwit\u201d signified both \u201chumour\u201d and \u201cwisdom\u201d The maxim from Hamlet entered the German language as \u201cIn der K\u00fcrze liegt die W\u00fcrze\u201d (brevity is the spice of life). The only astonishing thing is that hardly anyone sticks to it.<\/p>

Boredom kills
<\/strong>According to the Austrian literary critic Alfred Polgar, \u201clife is too short for a novel.\u201d Unfortunately, many people are convinced that what they want to say is much too interesting to be put concisely.<\/p>

The result is interminable presentations, Christmas speeches and congratulatory addresses. They\u2019re unbearable because there\u2019s often no escape. Another linguistic volte-face here, a little anecdote there. The agony of the audience is intensified by the fact that it\u2019s often clear from their face how much the person giving the speech is enjoying it.<\/p>

There\u2019s nothing wrong with flowery language. There\u2019s a place for it, and not just in literature or the NZZ Feuilleton. In reasonable doses it\u2019s quite desirable in a speech. What\u2019s highly undesirable is boring the audience. Bore the audience, and your listeners and viewers will drop out of the Zoom or Teams meeting quicker than blink.<\/p>

Those who speak freely, in other words those who don\u2019t read from a prepared manuscript, may sometime digress from the topic, but they\u2019ll rarely use complicated sentences with nested clauses. Our brain isn\u2019t designed for that. When it comes to the written language used by organisations, so-called corporate speak, it\u2019s a different matter entirely.<\/p>

Companies trying too hard to impress
<\/strong>If the reader doesn\u2019t immediately understand what you\u2019re trying to say, he or she will soon click to something new and never come back. So you\u2019d assume companies would want to use phrases that get to the heart of the matter. The reality is different.<\/p>

On websites and in brochures, it all seems to be about impressing the reader. The result is texts like this:<\/p>