Is Smart Brevity the right strategy for your content marketing?
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By Caroline Morris | Fitch Ink Associate Editor
People, on average, spend less than 30 seconds reading content online. That's not a lot of time for corporate communications to get a point across in this digital age.
Smart Brevity is a newer communication style that just might help.
Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz pioneered Smart Brevity over the course of creating an online news website, Axios, for the rushed consumer. The renowned journalists were key players at the news media company Politico, where they realized that no one was reading what they wrote. In 2017, they took years of research on how people read and take in information — and the few things they’d been doing right — to create Axios (and ultimately Smart Brevity) to efficiently communicate vital information to readers without a fog of words.
Axios provides readers with short snippets of news, often presented as bullet points or infographics, that take generally about a minute or so to consume. VandeHei, Allen and Schwartz describe this way of writing — which they call Smart Brevity — as “a system and strategy for thinking more sharply, communicating more crisply and saving yourself and others time. It guides you into saying a lot more with a lot less.”
It worked. Readership skyrocketed and many, from communications heads to political teams, started contacting Axios to learn how to write like they did because no one was reading their stuff. VandeHei, Allen and Schwartz soon realized their style would be useful to a larger world of communicators. Hence, they wrote the guidebook “Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less.”
That looks a little like this:
Why it matters: Today’s world is flooded with words and we can only choose to read so many of them. This review will save you time hemming and hawing about checking out “Smart Brevity,” and Smart Brevity will teach you how to pare down and get precise.
The point in a nutshell: Smart Brevity teaches you how to communicate effectively and think audience-first to change your writing for the better, make your readers happy and skyrocket success.
Key information and takeaways:
The book shows you how to use Smart Brevity in every scenario, from texting to live presentations, and even includes a worksheet to try (or you can use their AI tool Axios HQ to test your skills).
Write audience-first. If you write thinking about yourself, you’re doing it wrong.
When writing, figure out the one thing you want a reader to remember. That’s your focus and your lede/headline (that’s all people read anyway).
Follow the mantra “Then stop!” Write what you mean, then stop.
Blocks of text are tough. Make the information visually interesting (emojis, images/graphics, headers and bullet points) to engage attention.
On the whole: Smart Brevity is worth using, down to the smallest ways, and the book does an excellent job of teaching you how.
The bottom line: If you have a few hours and hate word vomit, give it a go. It doesn’t take up enough time to be a waste even if you don’t like it (especially since everyone is skimming anyway).
Go deeper: You can find the book here.
It’s noisy out there. Cut through the clutter and learn how to be a better writer and receive higher audience engagement with our Writing For Impact workshop, a step-by-step program from the experts at Fitch Ink.