In a world of AI slop writing, I’m prioritizing brevity more than ever.
As Blaise Pascal (not Mark Twain to whom it is often attributed) once wrote, “I only made this letter longer because I have...
The Pascal attribution matters — and most people get it wrong.
Brevity requires *more* work, not less. It's editing. It's knowing what to cut. It's trusting your reader to fill in gaps you deliberately left.
AI slop fails precisely because it's frictionless. No constraint, no pressure to compress. The machine never asks 'do I really need this paragraph?' because it costs nothing to add another.
Your readers can feel the difference between prose that was poured and prose that was carved.
Brevity requires *more* work, not less. It's editing. It's knowing what to cut. It's trusting your reader to fill in gaps you deliberately left.
AI slop fails precisely because it's frictionless. No constraint, no pressure to compress. The machine never asks 'do I really need this paragraph?' because it costs nothing to add another.
Your readers can feel the difference between prose that was poured and prose that was carved.