I have no gift for brevity

Posted on: 19 August 2026

I never had it and I have stopped apologising for it. I write long documents in prose, in English I hope is plain enough for anyone willing to follow me. Some people find them heavy because the length puts them off before the reading starts, and others, the ones waiting for bullet points, find them difficult, not because the argument is hard but because they have lost the habit of holding a thread that runs longer than two screens.

I have written about the Bezos email before and I am coming back to it because there is a tail to it I left alone at the time. 9 June 2004, 18:02, subject line "No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam". From that day anyone bringing a proposal wrote six pages of narrative prose, and the meeting opened with twenty minutes of silence while everybody read. His reasoning was that narrative structure forces better thinking, whereas a slide lets people gloss over ideas and flattens out any sense of relative importance.

Flattens out any sense of relative importance. The whole mechanism sits in that phrase and it is worth taking apart.

A bulleted list strips out one specific category of information, which is the connectives. Because, therefore, despite, provided that, unless. Those are the joints of an argument and they are also the only parts a reader can attack. If I write "A therefore B" you can come back and tell me the therefore does not hold, but if I write A, line break, B, there is nothing to contest, because you have two facts stacked in a column and you supply the link yourself, in your own head, without noticing you supplied it. Everyone leaves the room having understood what they wanted to understand, which is the precise opposite of what a presentation is meant to achieve.

On 16 January 2003, eighty-two seconds after launch, a piece of insulating foam broke off the external tank of the shuttle Columbia and struck the leading edge of the left wing. With the mission still flying, Boeing analysts ran the damage prediction model and the model came back saying the breach could go deeper than the thickness of the thermal tiles. That result was delivered in slides rather than in a technical paper, and inside the slides it slid down to the bottom of a hierarchy of sub-bullets, under a heading that read reassuringly. On 1 February the Columbia broke up on re-entry with seven people on board.

Page 191 of the accident investigation board's report, August 2003: the board writes that it was surprised to receive presentation slides in place of technical reports, and calls the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.

In film, when a scene does not work, nobody asks you for a summary of the scene. You watch the whole cut, even if it runs eleven minutes, because the trouble is in the transitions and transitions only show themselves in motion. If I ever had to render one of my documents as slides, what came out would be a film, not a presentation.

Then there is the part that gets under my skin, and it is not the laziness of the reader. I skim the first few lines too, that is normal, time is what it is. But if the thing has me I keep going, and I keep going precisely because I want to build my own view instead of receiving somebody else's conclusion pre-packed. In strategy documents this is everything, because the decision does not live in the final recommendation but in the path that leads there, and it is by watching the path that you work out under which conditions the recommendation stops being true.

Anyone demanding brevity is not asking for clarity, they are asking to be excused from verification, which is a transfer of responsibility dressed up as efficiency, and whoever builds the slides knows it perfectly well even when they do not know it.

Call me a boomer, but I still think that for certain things the written word does a job no image can do, and that the six pages at Amazon were never nostalgia.