How to win friends and influence people with just six words

Journalists Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz left

in 2016 to create what they described as "a hybrid of

and Twitter";

Axios, the resulting news service, became popular for its approach: texts do not exceed 300 words, are accompanied by summaries and twists to grab the reader's attention, and tend to mislead readers with clickbait-like

.

VandeHei, Allen and Schwartz got 10 million dollars (9.3 million euros) to launch it;

seven years later, they sold it for 525 million dollars (492 million euros).

“A third of work emails that need attention go unread.

Most of the words of most of the news are not read.

Almost all the chapters of practically all the books are not touched”, affirm the three journalists, not without drama, in a cultural moment in which everything that acquires visibility is susceptible to being franchised, from the opinions of a youtuber to

eccehomo failed.

It was only a matter of time before the

reached other formats and now its creators publish

(Smart Brevity: The Power to Say More with Less), where they take an even more radical approach: their new motto is that "everything worth saying can be said in six words."

The

tries to alleviate a specific discomfort linked, on the one hand, with the enormous amount of information that we are forced to process daily and, on the other hand, with the consequent reduction in the ability to attend to it.

“We wallow in noise and nonsense most of the time we are awake.

We are prisoners of words.

To write them.

To read them.

To listen to them

Then we wait, restless, chasing instant gratification or just something else: a laugh, a tease, a news story, a connection, a

, a

, retweets,

, confirm the authors, who add: “We scan almost everything that appears on our screens, we do not read.

What we really crave is receiving dopamine bursts, coming from text messages, tweets, Google searches, news, videos and messages.

We check our phones more than 344 times a day, at least once every four minutes.

The exhausting new phenomenon has clogged our inboxes, paralyzed workplaces, clogged our minds.

We all face an epic challenge: how do you get someone to pay attention to something important in this mess?

Regarding the writing of texts, not only journalistic ones, his answer is the following: ”Write what you want the reader, viewer or listener to remember.

Write it down before doing anything else.

Next,

try to shorten it to less than a dozen words.

It should be a statement or data, not a question.

Make sure it is new or essential.

Eliminate weak words and excess verbs or adjectives.

Then stop.

If we don't know what we mean or, more likely, if we don't understand what we're writing about, we cover it up by saying too much.

We do the same when we break off a relationship, ask for a raise, or confess to bad behavior.

Let's keep talking.

It is human nature.

And it ends relationships and communication.

So enough."

if we don't understand what we are writing about, we cover it up by saying too much.

We do the same when we break off a relationship, ask for a raise, or confess to bad behavior.

Let's keep talking.

It is human nature.

And it ends relationships and communication.

So enough."

if we don't understand what we are writing about, we cover it up by saying too much.

We do the same when we break off a relationship, ask for a raise, or confess to bad behavior.

Let's keep talking.

It is human nature.

And it ends relationships and communication.

So enough."

Example of language in social networks.

uly martin

Smart Brevity

is written in the style of Axios and in the language of social media and lower quality journalism: colloquial, judgmental, indulgent, aggressive;

as if it were written in all caps.

It is a style that operates by subtraction—the authors boast that their

is: "brevity is credibility, length is fear," and that their method is modeled on the briefings the CIA prepared for Donald Trump during his presidency—and responds to the same desire to simplify things that in the field of human relations and business made Dale Carnegie rich, the author of the

, and explains the success of "less is more" by Marie Kondo, minimalist web design and books as different as Biography

by the Spanish Pablo d'Ors, and

from the Germans Werner Tiki Küstenmacher and Lothar Seiwert;

It is the same desire for simplification that is behind written communication optimization services such as Grammarly, WordTune and Readable, as well as “toki pona”, a language developed by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang that only consists of 120 words and is already there. being used in some Spanish schools.

VandeHei, Allen and Schwartz promise that if we embrace their “smart brevity”, we can get recognized, be remembered, write more “engaging”, keep “everyone aligned and inspired”, expand our client base, to be heard again.

"Saying much more with much less," they say, "is the greatest power."

The problem with the

—and with the self-help products of an overwhelmed and

society in general— is that it's not worth much: like those of Dale Carnegie at the time, the promises of the authors of

—more money, more influence, more power— are difficult to fulfill in most lives.

But the radical simplification that its creators propose has other problems, and the main one is that simplified communication is not only unattractive, but also counterproductive: the complexity of political events and social and economic developments, as well as public and private organizations of late capitalism, requires communication that, unfortunately or not, is also complex.

Give someone like Trump a briefing to read with phrases like "Afghan government and security officials are discussing evacuation plans, according to [reporting attributed here],

The Afghan government fell in a few hours for that reason and even the most seemingly strong and stable democracy can be gradually eroded by oversimplifying common affairs into something else, only superficially democratic.

"With the old ways of communication, hardly anyone listens," say the authors of

.

But the problem is not that these forms of communication are "old", but that the "new" ones are teaching us to stop listening while habituating us to more and more verbal violence in the form of messages on social networks, headlines and statements.

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