I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter, But I Didn't Have the Time

In 1657, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a line that still holds up almost four hundred years later:

"I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."

It sounds like a joke, but Pascal meant it seriously. Writing long is easy — you just keep adding. Writing short takes real work: deciding what matters, cutting what doesn't, and having the discipline to leave good material on the floor because it isn't essential.

Most small business advertising gets this exactly backwards.

The instinct to say everything

When a business owner sits down to write a poster, a flyer, or an ad, the instinct is almost always to include everything. Every service offered. Every qualification earned. Every reason a customer might possibly care. It feels safer — leaving something out feels like leaving money on the table.

But an ad isn't a brochure, and it isn't read the way a brochure is read. A customer glances at a poster for two or three seconds, maybe less. In that window, an ad crowded with ten messages doesn't communicate ten things — it communicates nothing clearly, because nothing had room to stand out.

The businesses that actually get noticed usually aren't the ones saying the most. They're the ones who decided on the one thing that mattered most and said it clearly, with everything else cut away.

Brevity is a decision, not a shortcut

It's worth being precise about what "short" actually means here, because it's often misunderstood as "less effort." It's the opposite. A short, sharp piece of copy is usually the result of a longer, harder editing process than a long one — someone had to write the long version first, then do the harder work of figuring out what could be removed without losing the point.

That's exactly what Pascal was admitting. He didn't apologize for a long letter because he was lazy. He apologized because he ran out of time to do the harder work of making it short.

What this means for your next ad

Next time you're writing a poster, a flyer, or even a simple message to a customer, try a small exercise: write it the way you normally would, then cut it in half. Not by removing random sentences, but by asking, for each line, "does this help the one main point land, or is it competing with it?"

Most of what gets cut won't be missed. What's left is usually the ad that actually gets read.

You don't need to say everything to be remembered. You need to say the one thing that matters, and say it so clearly nobody has to work to understand it.