Even in the age of artificial intelligence, concise writing is rare and difficult to achieve.
Experienced writers recognize that a 2,000-word essay is not necessarily harder to pen than a 200-word blog post. Compressing big, sprawling ideas into something pointed is much harder than writing without guardrails.
Think about it: Short, punchy expressions or sentences leave an impact, and people transform them into memes that go viral. Meanwhile, a sizable share of even educated audiences lie about reading The New Yorker.
That’s not to say I don’t appreciate long-form writing — I’ve written two books and a number of lengthy features. But brevity is a constant challenge, and increasingly it seems to be what readers value and want.
French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it well in a 1657 letter:
I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.
Ultimately, a writer’s challenge is to distill and communicate, while also not wasting readers’ time.
The very best writers, it seems, are also the most exacting self-editors.
How to write with high-impact
While it can be helpful to start a piece by brain-dumping as many words as you can manage, rigorous cutting determines the quality of the final product.
Writer David Perrell popularized what he calls “screenshot essays,” which are effectively mini blogs. The idea is to pack a punch in as few words as possible. It’s a challenging, instructive exercise. Screenshot essays not only force you to get to the point, but they make the entire piece “the point.”
Here’s one I shared this weekend, which drew from a longer essay I wrote in December.
Readers, especially on social media, want only the essence of something. They are focused on outcomes and conclusions, not origin stories or winding narratives.
Entrepreneur Jason Fried has said if he could teach a writing class, he would require students to deliver every assignment in five iterations:
- 3-page essay
- 1-page essay
- 3-paragraph essay
- 1-paragraph version
- 1-sentence version
Similarly, when I pitch story ideas to my editors at Business Insider, I’ve learned that if I can’t narrow an idea down to a single sentence, it’s not yet specific enough.
It’s only once I can distill something into one sentence I’m confident I’ve landed on what matters most.
AI does not make good writers obsolete
As established, those who can deploy language with brevity and precision are useful and rare. To me, the rise of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT does not change that.
I’ve had many conversations with other journalists on whether ChatGPT has made our jobs redundant. I say no.
My guess is AI will create a wedge between those who embrace it and those who do not or cannot. There’s always been a skill gap between top performers and the rest of the pack — new technologies typically exaggerate what is already the case.
The notion that AI makes good writers moot also seems misguided because these individuals are usually the clearest thinkers in the room. The brightest minds from Wall Street to Silicon Valley are often prolific writers. Millions of readers follow the writings of Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, Paul Graham, Sam Altman and other business luminaries.
Plus, you only need a few minutes with ChatGPT to realize that, while it’s brilliant at aggregating and summarizing, it isn’t so handy as far as diction and style. It communicates as you’d expect a robot might. Its language is sterilized, jargon-heavy, and generally inhuman.
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