![]() Every chapter leads off with a word count and the number of minutes required to read it, white space complements bolded text and bullet points, and paragraphs rarely break two sentences. The book is designed less to be read than it is to be consumed: Like a fast-food value meal, it’s tightly engineered to deliver content in a digestible package for the on-the-go knowledge worker. Its recommendations follow the trajectory of the authors’ careers: from traditional print journalism like The Washington Post to the founding of Politico, with its quick-hit dopamine stories modeled on ESPN’s SportsCenter, to Axios, which brought an even briefer aesthetic to daily briefings. With an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” ethos, Smart Brevity argues that there’s no way to overcome the distraction economy, so one must fine tune one’s writing to compete with TikTok and Twitter. ![]() Rather than fight the trend of online distraction, Smart Brevity’s authors embrace it: Today’s writing, they argue, must be fast, clipped, cut to the bone, with every sentence tightly packed with information and designed to grab eyeballs. Keeping a reader’s attention is harder than ever, and VandeHei, Allen, and Schwartz know it. We’re now checking our phones something like 344 times a day, once every four minutes. Go a little deeper, and you can see what happens when you privilege one goal-saving time-over all others: a book by veteran political writers that manages to deliberately efface the essential politics inherent in rhetorical style. The book advocates short (no sentence longer than six words!), declarative judgments like the sentence that begins this review-a sentence that, while meeting the authors’ stylistic criteria, is not entirely fair to the book or to you, the reader of this review. Smart Brevity, as its title implies, argues for a writing style that is short and punchy and trims the fat from most corporate, academic, and personal communication. Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz have failed to translate the power of the successful rhetorical style pioneered in their political website, Axios, into a book. Workman Publishing Company, 224 pp., $27.00
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