I saw one excellency was within my reach, — it was brevity, and I determined to obtain it. — Jay.
When I went into a New York business house recently, this confronted me, and drove its lesson forcibly home. A little later, in Chicago, I ran across a similar warning not to waste the time of businesspeople:
Be Brief!
We Have Our Living to Make, And It Takes Considerable of Our Time To Do It.
Such posted notices show two things, — the immense value in modern life of dispatch and quick performance of business, and the presence in business of a lot of persons whose sole visible mission seems to be to prevent this being done. The day of the bore and the long-winded discourser is past, and these mottoes furnish a polite way of telling these time-wasters what could not be told in words without offence. Modern methods have no place, no tolerance for them.
If there is anything that exasperates a businessman it is to try to do business with men who never get anywhere, who never come to the point, who “beat about the bush” with long introductions and meaningless verbiage. Like a dog which turns around a half dozen times and then lies down where he was in the first place, they tire one out with useless explanations, introductions, and apologies, and talk about all sorts of things but the business of the moment.
There are some men you never can bring to the point. They will wander all around it, over it and under it, always evading and avoiding, but never quite touching the marrow. Their minds work by indirection; their mental processes are not exact. They are like children in the play called “Poison,” — they try to avoid touching the designated object. It seems unaccountable that people will take so much trouble apparently to avoid coming to the point.
The business caller who takes his ease, lounges down in a chair, and talks familiarly of anything that comes into his system-less head, is nowadays sure to kill the success of the business he is trying, in his weak and inefficient way, to put through. Modern business is touch-and-go, take it or leave it, if you don't want it somebody else does. Every moment of a business interview should be applied to the object in hand, the matter under consideration. Some people, however, do not seem to have the ability to come right squarely up to the point at issue. Judges and lawyers say that it is practically impossible to get from some witnesses the information wanted on a certain point. Though the attorney may resort to all sorts of ingenious methods to get a direct answer, the witnesses will not commit themselves. They talk all around the point, go almost up to it on every side, but stop short of it or avoid it.
I know a businessman who is so indirect and long-drawn-out in his conversation that I almost always get out of patience while doing business with him and wondering if he is ever going to finish, and can hardly resist constant reference to my watch. When he calls me by telephone, I feel like leaning back in my chair and elevating my feet, because I know I must sacrifice at least a quarter of an hour of valuable time right in the midst of business hours. Such people are nuisances. More or less of this long-drawn-out quality, lack of directness and pointedness, is to be expected in professional men and in women, but it is a fatal quality for an ambitious young businessman. It is a success-killer. Men who get through a large amount of work, men of great executive ability, are quick, concise, accurate, pointed.
I have another business friend, very successful, who calls me by telephone, and, without any preliminaries, proceeds right to the subject, states his proposition, and, almost before I can think what he has said, says, "Goodbye," and is gone. It is a perfect luxury to do business with such a man. He never bores you, never tires you. I never see this friend without feeling great admiration for his mental alertness, prompt decision, and efficiency. This executive quality, is not difficult to cultivate if one begins early and knows his defects. One should train himself constantly to concentrate his thoughts, to crystallize his business into concise, clean-cut sentences.
In no other way will a man betray lack of the quality of dispatch so much as in his correspondence. It can often be detected in the first sentence of an unbusinesslike letter. I have corresponded with people on important matters for weeks, writing letter after letter asking the same question, urging that it be answered directly, and yet, every time it was evaded, apparently not intentionally, but just as surely and aggravatingly.
Business letters should be models of condensation, crystallized into a few sentences. Compactness, comprehensiveness and pointedness are characteristics of the letters of a successful man of affairs, who will say more in a dozen lines than another can write on two pages. A single letter from a man we have not seen betrays the whole structure of his mind.
It is said that Agassiz, from a tiny bone, from a foot, perhaps, could reproduce an entire prehistoric animal, giving its habits, telling what kind of food it subsisted upon, where it lived, etc., even if it was extinct before man came upon the earth. Just so an observant person can, from a letter, a brief conversation, a telegraphic or telephonic message, describe the structure of the individual's mind, whether narrow or broad, logical or illogical, orderly or disorderly, can tell you of his mental habits, and whether he is clean-cut or a slipshod and slovenly man.
It is a good drill, in business correspondence, to imagine that you are writing a cablegram where every word costs twenty-five cents, and to try to express the greatest amount of the thought in the fewest words. After you have written a letter or an essay as concisely as you think possible, go over it again and erase every superfluous word, recasting the sentences. By studying brevity of expression, one will soon overcome the slipshod habit of spreading over a page many sentences containing only a straggling, illogical thought. Such practice will also greatly improve the quality of one's thinking. Brevity should also be applied to conversation; effort being made to see how few words can be made to express the greatest idea. Begin very near where you mean to leave off.
Many a boy has failed to obtain a good situation by answering an advertisement with a sprawling, slipshod letter; and many a man owes his success to a concise application for a position. I have seen businessmen, in looking over a large number of applications for a situation, set aside a single letter because of its neatness, compactness, and brevity of statement. The practised eye of the employer saw in that letter that its author was a young man of executive promise although he had never seen him, while a long-drawn-out letter, covering pages of self-laudation, did not attract him. He knew that the boy would correspond with his letter, and the letter of a few lines, which said a great deal, made a strong and favorable impression.
When boys and young men ask my opinion about their ability to succeed in business, I try to find out whether they have this power of directness, of coming to the point clearly, squarely, and forcibly without indirection, without parleying, without useless words. If they lack this quality, apparently there is little chance of their succeeding in a large way, for this is characteristic of men of affairs who achieve great things. The indirect man is always working to disadvantage. He labors hard, but never gets anywhere. It is the direct man who strikes sledge-hammer blows, the man who can penetrate the very marrow of a subject at every stroke and get the meat out of a proposition who does things.
The same is true of authors. The ever-living authors have expressed their thoughts in transparent language. They have stripped the expression of their ideas of verbiage, of all superfluity. They have chosen words which exactly fit the thought. They have left no traces of anything perishable which time can corrode or affect, and so they live always. What power will time ever have to erase a single sentence from Lincoln's immortal speech at Gettysburg, Longfellow's "Psalm of Life,” or Shakespeare’s divine creations? How many centuries and ages, think you, would obliterate Christ's story of the lilies of the field, or the Sermon on the Mount, or Gray's "Elegy"?
The greatest writers have spent hours hunting for a word which would give the exact delicacy of expression desired, or an entire day rewriting, rearranging and polishing a single line in a poem. In a letter, which one of these immortals wrote to a friend, he said, in speaking of his work: — "I am still at it at the rate of a line a day." Nulla dies sine linea.
Some imperishable poems and immortal bits of prose have been elaborated during years of thought and patient endeavor for fitting expression which would stand the test of time. Men who have written for immortality have put weeks, months, years, perhaps, into a poem or a chapter. There are writers who have gained fame with a few brief sentences, a stanza or verse, while others who have written scores of volumes are forgotten before they die. Limpidity of thought and directness of language have frequently been the determining factors of such fame or oblivion.
Young writers attribute Kipling's fame to unusual genius. No doubt he has a great deal of natural ability, yet many of these young writers would not deign to rewrite a story from eight to ten times, as Kipling does, in order to express his thought in the most forceful, telling, and most concise manner before giving it to the public. They would expect, with a tithe of his experience and carefulness, to write a story in a few hours and then feel hurt because it was returned with thanks. An editor can tell very quickly whether a manuscript bears the stamp of concentrated thought and persistent endeavor, for every sentence betrays the writer's mind. An editor's experienced eye detects a looseness of expression, a lack of balance and mastery in the use of language. He notes feverish haste, scorning patient endeavor to find proper words, and sees the lack of finish. Such defects influence his decision. He sees the traces of effort which true art always conceals, and every unnatural straining after effect, and lack of simplicity and conciseness in treatment. The trouble with most writers is that they are "addicted to language," — their thought is covered up with words, words, words. They should take the advice of Tryon Edwards, — "Have something to say, and stop when you 're done."