In writing, briefer is often better, but there’s only so much you can leave out, before, in fact, you’ve left out everything. Like the truth of your life story, for example. Or the guts and glory of a real competitive advantage you hold in the marketplace.

Not everything worth saying can be collapsed into a tag line or a twit. Unless you are, forgive me, a twit. Not by a long shot.

Brevity is undoubtedly a sign of excellence in some, but in others it’s how mediocrity hides. The less said the better. In brevity, bogus claims go unchallenged, because, what is there to challenge? Not much.

In media driven brevity, people are deified and then sacrificed on the same alter of public opinion. Because who has time to find out what really happened?

No wonder some clients are opting for longer form writing approaches: they have something to say.

A high tech sales organization hired Relativity Writing to develop a full on case study. Not the challenge, solution, outcome one paragraph version, but a multipage story. They have a socially conscious employment model to boast about that also happens to be a big bad competitive advantage. And they have outcomes. But you only understand the full value of the outcomes if you get the context.

Who has time to reach such a tome? Maybe decision maker considering investing significant strategic resources. They may want more to go on than a twit.

Another potential client is an Olympic gold medal winner. She experienced being recognized divine one moment and demonized the next. Perhaps for no other reason than to embellish a news cycle. She’s got great achievement in her right alongside anger, insight and reinvention. Try packing all that into a blog post. Here’s to writing a book length rebuttal of a lifetime of superficial exposure. Brevity just can’t cover it.