Comment by bostik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bostik | Hacker News Reader

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I've taken Feynman's rule as the guiding star of all communication: if you can not explain your point of view understandably, you do not understand it well enough yourself. (Implication: shut the f##k up until you do, and can.) I've added the requirement from Saint-Exupéry: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away." Then I've taken that to combination to its logical extreme:

Make your point in seven words.

More recently I have learned that Cicero had the same rule for his effective communication. Although he had the upper limit at ten words.

The Finnish language has a wonderful capability to express all of that in a single word: "Asiaan!" -- to convey the same message in English you need to waste five words in total, "get to the point already".

You're going too far.

De Saint-Exupéry had a reasonable idea.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be exactly as complex as they are.

If you pick an arbitrary number, you are limiting yourself only to simpler ideas.

Keep it suitably simple.

I don't try to claim it's easy in any way, but for me it is a thing to aspire for.

Nuance takes time and space. So does conveying context. Nonetheless, if there is a way to compress the core of the message into just seven words, I will try to do so. When it succeeds, it helps to hold attention long enough to actually deliver the more nuanced details.

Another commenter brought up the old-school journalists' pyramid rule. I'm very much aware that what I aim for is an extreme form of focusing on the sharp pointy end.

You are making the classic mistake of taking some good generic pieces of advice and forming them into a non-sensical and limiting rule. Do yourself a favor and let things be judged by their effect and not their limitations.

It's very funny that it took you 140 words to say "cut until you have 7 words".

I'd be careful about modelling my communication style after Cicero. He ended up decapitated and his head put on the Senate rostrum. Seems like a pretty clear message about what people thought of his communication style, in my view.

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