When you have a few billion people connected with screens, not voice... screens are important. You can transmit a thousand times more information.
Don't write anything you can phone. Don't phone anything you can talk. Don't talk anything you can whisper. Don't whisper anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you can nod. Don't nod anything you can wink.
We don't communicate in full sentences anyway. We don't need all those words.
If you have to go back and spell-check the text you're about to send, you're saying too much.
Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.
E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I'm concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it.
I don't care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words.
What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?
News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.
Every word you add dilutes the sentence.
If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don't have a business.
You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.
If you look at the history of the letter in the novel, small changes in the British postal service became really significant because of how quickly people are suddenly able to communicate, and letters actually arrive at the intended time, and they arrive to the correct recipient. All of this is really important to a plot.
At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.
Words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there's a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there's more efficiency.
You can transmit a thousand times more information.
It makes me so much calmer when I’m responding to e-mails later.
The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.
If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.
The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.
There's a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.
Email, instant messaging, and cell phones give us fabulous communication ability, but because we live and work in our own little worlds, that communication is totally disorganized.
Do I want to spend my diminished working hours writing or answering email? Now I have somebody read through them. If someone has something really important to tell me I write back. Otherwise they get the auto reply.
