Keep it snappy, keep it short: why brevity is always best
Among the latter was a message from a conference organiser saying that if there was one thing he had learnt from decades of listening to executives prattle on, oblivious to the fidgeting, visible boredom and, in some cases, loud snoring of their audience, it was this: never speak in public for longer than it takes you to make love.
The maxim evoked some rather unpleasant images. But I found myself nodding nevertheless. I have lost count of the number of times I have been so bored during an over-long speech that I have resorted to reading the washing instructions inside my blazer to pass the time. But I would go much further and say that, nowadays, everything is too long.
I have no scientific proof to offer in support of this argument. But the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. The big blockbuster of the moment, for instance, is King Kong. It is three hours and seven minutes long. The big children's book of the moment is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It is 607 pages long. Among the presents I received for Christmas were Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - 20 hours of game play and I haven't got past the first few levels yet - a 16-track album by Ryan Adams - still haven't got to the end of it - and Vikram Seth's503-page Two Lives, its title presumably an allusion to the time it takes to finish.
My complaint, it transpires, is not a new one. The 19th century aphorist Sir Arthur Helps once remarked: "Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long." The strange thing is that the statement should still be valid in the 21st century, when conventional wisdom has it that everything is getting shorter. It is often said that MTV reduced the collective attention span of Generation X to three minutes and that technology is further intensifying our appetite for the bite-size. Yet we are having to sit through movies longer than the Korean war and plough through novels that could double as footstools.
Various factors seem to be driving the trend. Many blockbusters and books are too long because they are created by people so successful that no one dares edit them. And advances in technology (bigger hard-drives, DVDs and so on) mean that it is easier for things such as computer games to be long. However, I suspect there is something else encouraging prolixity: laziness. In short, people can't be bothered with the effort of editing.
Admittedly, this concern with brevity is something of a personal fetish. Being force-fed three-hour-long Bollywood movies as a child, struggling to read everything I was meant to for my English literature degree and becoming a journalist, a job where you always have one eye on the word count, I have developed a phobia of length. But it seems that in a world where length is the easy option, where, with a click, you can copy thousands of words into a document from the internet, conciseness is to be encouraged.
And nowhere is brevity more important than in relation to language - both spoken and written. William Strunk Jr put it best in The Elements of Style (1918): "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
Of course, even this passage could be edited, with no reduction in fluency. And I would concede that when it comes to artistic matters such as "good writing", length is not always bad. Henry James could have written 500 pages about the washing instructions inside his blazer and it would have been a good read. Similarly, even at three hours 47 minutes, Lawrence of Arabia is hardly boring - I'd rather sit through it twice than endure the 97 minutes of Herbie: Fully Loaded another time.
But for every long artistic work that is brilliant, I could show you 50 that would have been better shorter. Moreover, when it comes to non-artistic matters - "human affairs" such as business - over-length is nearly always bad.
Unfortunately, long-windedness in business is rampant. I have yet to attend a two-day conference that couldn't have been better conducted across a single day, or a day-long training course where the content couldn't have been disseminated over a single morning session. And nobody has ever said of any presentation: it was great but too short.
Similarly, meetings, career discussions, away days, annual reports, office parties, mission statements, conference calls, memos, business books, e-mails and the legal disclaimers at the end of e-mails are all too long. And then there are business columns, the prolixity of which I can, in this case at least, do something about, by ending four lines before I am meant to.
爽快点，简短点
上周，我写了一篇文章，谈到我宁可饿死也不愿当众演讲。此后，我收到两类读者来信：一类发来电子邮件的人跟我差不多，宁可饿死也不愿演讲；而另外一类人最近刚受到冗长演讲的折磨，感到极度沮丧。
在后面这类邮件中，有一封来自一位会议组织者。他说，几十年目睹高管们不顾听众坐立不安、明显厌倦、有时还鼾声如雷，而依然不停地废话连篇之后，让他从中学到了一个道理，那就是：当众演讲的时间千万不要超过你做爱的时间。
这个座右铭勾画了一幅相当令人不快的画面。但是我发现自己对此还是颇为赞同的。记不清有多少次，我在听冗长过度的演讲时无聊至极，只好看自己运动衫里的洗涤说明来打发时间。不过，我还要进一步指出：现在，所有的东西都太长了。
我拿不出什么科学证据来支持这一论断。但是各种轶事证据倒是一抓一大把。例如，时下最轰动的电影《金刚》(King Kong)长达3小时零7分钟；如今极受欢迎的儿童读物《哈利?波特与混血王子》(Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)长达607页。在我收到的圣诞礼物中，有《侠盗车手：圣安地列斯》(Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas)――这是一款长达20小时的游戏，而我连最初几关还没过呢；有收录16首瑞安?亚当斯(Ryan Adams)歌曲的唱片――我到现在也没听完；还有维克拉姆?塞斯(Vikram Seth)长达503页的《两个生命》(Two Lives)，大概此书的标题暗示了读完它所要花费的时间。
我吐露的怨言并非什么新观点。19世纪的格言家阿萨?赫尔帕斯爵士(Sir Arthur Helps)曾经说过：“几乎所有人类事务都很乏味。一切都过于冗长。每一样事情都太长了。拜访、用餐、音乐会、演出、演讲、诉状、论文、布道，全都太长了。”奇怪的是，他的话在21世纪似乎同样有效，而传统观点（conventional wisdom）本来以为一切都变短了。人们常说，MTV将X一代(译者注：指婴儿潮之后、1961年至1983年出生的一代人)的注意力时间缩短至3分钟，而科技进一步强化了我们对小型事物的嗜好。然而，如今我们坐着看电影的时间却比朝鲜战争时更长了，我们费力阅读的小说两本加起来就能当脚凳用。
这一趋势背后似乎有各种因素。许多畅销电影和书籍太长，是因为创作者们太成功了，没有人胆敢删减它们。而随着科技的进步（更大的硬盘、DVD技术等等），意味着电脑游戏之类的东西容易变得更长。然而，我怀疑还有某种原因也鼓励冗长：懒惰。简言之，人们不愿费力去删减。
不可否认，这种对简洁的关注可能出于一种个人情结。我的孩提时代充斥着长达3小时的宝来坞(Bollywood)电影，学生时代为获得英语语言文学学位而挣扎于各类必读书籍之中，毕业后成为一名记者，这份职业又让你总是关注文章字数，因此，我心中产生了对拖沓冗长的恐惧。但在这个冗长易如反掌、点击一下鼠标就可以从网上复制数千文字贴入你的文档的世界里，简练应该受到鼓励。
没有什么领域比语言更需要简洁了。小威廉?斯特伦克(William Strunk Jr)在《文体入门》(The Elements of Style，1918年出版)一书中对此做出了最好的阐释：“生动的文章是简练的。一句话里不应出现不必要的词汇，一段话里也不应出现不必要的句子，这与一幅图画不应存在不必要的线条、一台机器也不应存在不必要的零件是一样的道理。这不是要求作者将所有句子都缩短，或者删掉所有细节，把主题仅粗略地描述出来，而是要求每个词都言之有物。”
当然，我这篇文章也可以被编辑，只要不影响语句流畅即可。而我也承认，当涉及到艺术问题时，比如“佳作”，长一些并不总是坏事。亨利?詹姆斯(Henry James)能够为夹克衫中的洗涤说明写出500多页的文字，但仍值得一读。同样，《阿拉伯的劳伦斯》(Lawrence of Arabia)尽管长达3小时47分钟，却并不枯燥，我宁愿再看它一遍，也不愿再忍受一次仅为97分钟的《疯狂金龟车》(Herbie: Fully Loaded)。
偶尔有些长篇文艺作品可谓是辉煌，但我可以向你证明，并不是所有书有必要写那么长。对大多书来说。如果有所删减的话，可能会好很多。另外，当涉及非艺术性问题时――比如商业之类的“人类事务”，过分冗长则几乎永远不都是好事。
不幸的是，商业中的拖沓冗长正日益猖獗。我去参加过一些为期两天的会议或者为期一天的培训课程，而这些会议原本可以只用一天，那些课程其实也可以用一个上午就可以全部讲完。从来没有人这样谈论别人的发言：这个发言很棒，就是太短了。
同样，会议、职业发展讨论、公司外出讨论会、年报、办公室派队、任务陈述、电话会议、备忘录、商业书籍、电子邮件以及电子邮件末尾的法律免责条款都太长了。还有商业专栏。我希望至少在今天这种情况下，能够为避免拖沓冗长做些贡献，我要就此打住，省略我本想说的最后四行字。
