【TED】How to write less but say more？

So I've got some tough medicine for you. The truth is that everybody in this room needs to radically rethink how you communicate, especially how you write, if you want anything to stick in this distracted digital world. I don't care if you're a student, if you're an academic, if you're a scientist, you're a CEO, a manager.

我今天要给大家来一剂猛药。 事实上，在座的每个人 都该彻底重新思考一下自己的沟通方式， 特别是写作方式， 要想让自己的作品在这个 信息纷杂的时代留下痕迹的话。 不管你是学生、学者、 科研人员、CEO，还是经理。

I'll tell you what the data told me that your friends won't tell you, which is almost nobody listens to or reads most of what you write. Most of the stuff that you agonize thinking about, they pay no attention to.

我来告诉你一些数据告诉我的事情， 这些事你的朋友可不会告诉你， 那就是你写的东西基本上没人会留意。 大部分你苦苦思索的事情， 他们根本不会仔细留心。

And how do I know this? Well, I learned it the hard way. I've dedicated my entire life to mass producing words. I was a journalist by training. Started at the "Oshkosh Northwestern." Worked my way up to covering the presidency for "The Washington Post" and the "Wall Street Journal." And I started two media companies, all about mass producing words. Politico and now Axios. And at my current company, the entire premise of the company is to teach journalists and then CEOs, academics and others how to use far fewer words.

那我又是怎么知道的呢？ 这是我好不容易才明白的。 我一生致力于大量写作。 我是科班出身的记者。 我从《奥什科什西北》起步， （今日美国旗下的报纸） 一路向上，到在《华盛顿邮报》 和《华尔街日报》报道总统选举。 我还创办了两家大量输出文字的媒体公司， 分别是叫 Politico 网站和 如今的 Axios 新闻网。 而我现在的公司， 整个大宗旨就是 去指导记者、CEO、学者等人 怎样大大减少文字篇幅。

So why? Why, if I spent my entire life writing lots of words, do I want people to use fewer of them? Because the data -- and you -- made me. If you actually look at what you're doing -- One of the most interesting things about technology, one of the creepiest things about technology is businesses know so much about you. What you do, where you go, what you buy. And in the case of a media company, how you consume information. And the data about how you consume information is eye-popping. And to be honest, for me, really humbling. And led to this journey about, wow, if I'm looking at this data and the data basically says: you read almost nothing. You skim. You might look at a headline. You might look at a subject line. But you're basically not reading the stories, in my case, that we were producing. And the most humbling moment, the eye-opening, the aha moment for me: I was a journalist, I was at Politico writing columns about President Obama. And we wrote this column, and I looked at the traffic numbers and the White House had to respond to it. And boy, was I feeling cool and smart ... until I looked at the data. So back then you had to paginate pages online. And so, you know, you had to click from one page to the next to keep reading. And I looked at the data. This was a 1600-word column that everyone in Washington was talking about, that had me feeling so confident. And I realized almost nobody went past the first page.

那么为什么要这样呢？ 为什么，我一辈子都在大量写作， 但想让人们少写文字？ 因为数据——还有你们 ——让我不得不这么做。 如果你们仔细看看自己在做什么—— 科技最有趣的一点， 科技最恐怖的一点就是 企业会非常了解你。 你做了什么事，去了什么地方， 买了什么东西。 如果是媒体公司， 那他们就知道你如何获取信息。 这些数据真让人大跌眼镜， 说实话，让我感到非常羞耻。 我也就踏上了这段旅程， 我看着这数据， 数据基本上显示： 你们基本上什么都没读。 你们或许扫读，看一看头条， 或许看一眼标题， 但你们基本上不会读正文内容， 不会去读我们发布的内容。 最让我愧疚， 最让我大吃一惊的是时候： 当时我是一名记者， 我在为奥巴马总统写专栏。 我们发表专栏文章， 然后我会查阅流量数据， 白宫还必须做出回复。 天啊，当时我感觉自己很酷，很聪明…… 直到我查看了数据。 那时候，线上文章需要分页。 所以你完一页 必须点击下一页才能继续读， 我查看了数据。 那是一篇 1600 字的专栏文章， 当时华盛顿的人都在讨论这篇文章， 所以我对自己很有信心， 然后我意识到基本没有人 看完了第一页。

It gets worse. On one page, there's only 450 words. And I hid a lot of the good stuff at the end. And so it turns out that people were responding, sharing, talking about a story that almost nobody read. And so it put me on sort of this journey, this discovery. I'm like, really, like, nobody reads anything? Is this true everywhere, is it just me, is there something about my writing?

还有更糟糕的， 第一页只有 450 词， 我在文章末尾藏了不少有趣的内容。 原来人们交流、分享、 讨论的是一篇几乎没人读过的文章。 就这样我踏上这段旅程，我开始研究。 我想，真的吗，没有人读？ 其他地方也是这样吗， 只有我遇到这种情况吗，是我写得不好吗？

So I called my friends at the "New York Times." I called our friends at Facebook. I started to talk to academics and try to figure out, well, what's going on here. Because I had a choice at this point. I could give up on all of you. I could give up on humanity. I could give up on my career. Or I could do what basically Jeff Bezos would do if he's trying to sell you a shoe or get you to buy a book. Which is, what is the data telling us? What do you want? What are you doing? And that data was showing that one, everybody was getting hit with more information than ever before and is perpetually distracted, all because of the internet. You skim. You don't really read. And you share stuff without even bothering to see what it actually means or what the story might say.

所以我联系了我在《纽约时报》的朋友， 联系了我在脸书的朋友。 我开始与学者们谈话， 我想弄清楚究竟为什么会这样。 因为我当时有一个选择。 我可以放弃读者们，放弃人性化的追求， 我可以放弃整个职业生涯。 或者我可以做杰夫·贝索斯 （Jeff Bezos亚马逊总裁） 卖鞋或者是卖书时做的事情。 数据告诉我们了什么？ 你们想要什么？你在做什么？ 数据显示，第一， 所有人都在被空前的信息量裹挟， 这些信息非常分散人的注意力， 都是因为互联网。 人们一目十行，并不会认真阅读。 转发之前甚至不愿意 认真看看内容是什么意思， 或者这个文章具体是说什么的。

And if you think about it, the deeper I dug, the more it actually made sense. For people who are my age or older, like once upon a time, the iPhone didn't exist. The Android didn't exist. There was no Facebook. There was no Google. If you wanted to learn about something new, you had to go to an encyclopedia. You wanted to look up a word, you went to a dictionary. If you were waiting for news, you had to wait for the evening news or the morning newspaper. And then suddenly 2007, that period comes along, and now all of us had the opportunity to have a smartphone with astonishing capabilities to give us access to more information than at any point of humanity. Any idea we had, anything we didn't know, we could Google it. Any idea we had, no matter how stupid it was, we could share it. And not only could we share it, we could find other people who would applaud, who would follow us, who'd fan us. And suddenly, oh my gosh, like, we've got all this access to mass information at scale. And you could do this for free. You could do this for free. So suddenly we're getting hit with all this information, and I don't think our species was built to keep up with it.

所以我联系了我在《纽约时报》的朋友， 联系了我在脸书的朋友。 我开始与学者们谈话， 我想弄清楚究竟为什么会这样。 因为我当时有一个选择。 我可以放弃读者们，放弃人性化的追求， 我可以放弃整个职业生涯。 或者我可以做杰夫·贝索斯 （Jeff Bezos亚马逊总裁） 卖鞋或者是卖书时做的事情。 数据告诉我们了什么？ 你们想要什么？你在做什么？ 数据显示，第一， 所有人都在被空前的信息量裹挟， 这些信息非常分散人的注意力， 都是因为互联网。 人们一目十行，并不会认真阅读。 转发之前甚至不愿意 认真看看内容是什么意思， 或者这个文章具体是说什么的。

I talked to a guy at the University of Maryland who's studied students for the last decade, and he basically found that even when you choose to read something, even when you make the choice that this is important, you spend on average 26 seconds looking at it. Review.org and others have looked at how many times do you look at your screen in a day. They found it's at least 250 times you're checking your phone. And for those that don't think that's true, think about how many times you've either checked it or thought about checking it since I started babbling.

我与来自马里兰大学的一个人谈话， 他过去十年都在做有关学生的研究， 基本上，他发现即使你想要读些什么， 即使你告诉自己这很重要， 你只会花平均 26 秒阅读。 测评网站（Review.org）等机构 调查了人们每天查看手机屏幕的次数， 发现人们至少查看手机 250 次。 大家要是不信的话， 想一想我站在这里唠唠叨叨的时候， 你们有几次看了或者想看手机，

Our data shows that more often than not, if you share a story on social media, you never read it. Think about that: like there’s something about a headline or a photo that got you so jacked up that you're going to share it like you're a little lemming. And we all do it because our brains are being, like, flooded with information.

我与来自马里兰大学的一个人谈话， 他过去十年都在做有关学生的研究， 基本上，他发现即使你想要读些什么， 即使你告诉自己这很重要， 你只会花平均 26 秒阅读。 测评网站（Review.org）等机构 调查了人们每天查看手机屏幕的次数， 发现人们至少查看手机 250 次。 大家要是不信的话， 想一想我站在这里唠唠叨叨的时候， 你们有几次看了或者想看手机，

And what I thought when I did the discovery, I thought, for sure the brain must be getting rewired. And you hear that often. There's very little scientific proof that that's true. What happened and what we think is happening is, as a species, we've always been prone to distraction. We think we're good multitaskers. Almost nobody is. We're good at doing one thing if you're focused on it. The University of California, Irvine, studied this. They studied our distractibility and found that if you get distracted on something, it takes you 20 minutes to truly refocus. Now think about your day. It's just awash in distraction. Awash in words: tweeted words, texted words, Slacked words, email words. Words, words, words. And then you peck at your little computer looking for more. So no wonder nobody's paying attention to almost anything you're saying or doing. No wonder it's so hard to get people to pay attention to anything.

我研究这些事时以为， 我以为，大脑一定会重新布线。 大家也经常听到这种说法， 但是很少有科学研究结果证实。 现实情况，或我们认为的情况是 人类经常容易分散注意力。 我们自以为能同时完成多项任务， 但其实没人是这样。 人类擅长集中注意力做一件事情。 加州大学欧文分校做了相关研究。 他们研究了人类注意力分散， 发现如果人的注意力被分散， 那要花 20 分钟 才能真正重新集中注意。 现在想一想自己的一天， 简直是泛滥的干扰。 泛滥的文字：推特、信息、 通讯软件、邮件。 文字、文字、文字。 然后你们又会在小电脑上继续看文字。 所以怪不得基本上你说的、 做的所有事都没人留意。 怪不得想让人集中注意有那么难。

So at Axios, as we thought about this, we said, listen, if the consumer’s saying they want more information quicker and they're not going to spend that much time and you want to stay in journalism, what would you do? What would you do? And our solution was what we call Smart Brevity, that people want smart content, essential content. But they want it delivered efficiently, as fast as humanly possible. And we saw it in how people were getting our information, how they were getting it elsewhere. And so we built a whole company around it to teach journalists how to do it. And journalists kind of adapted right away. And suddenly we had awesome readership almost overnight, people in the White House, CEOs, tech leaders.

所以在值得，我们思考这一点， 我们想，如果读者想快速获取信息， 不会在这上面花太多时间， 而我又想留在新闻界， 你会怎么做？你会怎么做？ 我们的解决办法是 智慧简洁（Smart Brevity）。 人们想要智慧的内容，重要的内容， 还想要高效获取，越快越人性化越好。 我们观察人们从我们这里 获取信息的模式、 从别处获取信息的模式。 所以我们围绕这个概念 成立了一家公司，教记者怎么去做。 记者们很快采用了学到的技能。 我们几乎一夜之间就有了大量读者， 有白宫工作人员、 CEO 、 科技行业领导者。

And then two interesting things happened after that. I started to get not ten or 20, literally hundreds of notes from readers saying, "Thank you, you're trying to save me time. I can tell." I never asked for a thank you, especially when you cover politics, you're lucky not to get hit by a shoe, much less actually have someone thank you for it. But I was like, "Oh, that is interesting."

之后发生了两件有趣的事情。 我收到了不是十几二十个， 而是上百条读者留言说， “谢谢，我看得出来 你努力为我节省时间。” 我从未设想别人会感谢我， 尤其是我报道政治新闻， 没被鞋砸就算幸运了， 有人感谢你就更不太可能了。 但我想，“这很有趣。”

And then about a year and a half in, we started to get calls from companies, from the NBA, from startups, and almost all were saying the same thing: "Hey, our executives, our people, they're reading Smart Brevity, but they won't read anything that we do internally. This led me on another journey to figure out why people can't get people to read about things that are happening at their company or happening at their school or happening at their startup. And it turned out that basically people were vomiting so many words in all these places that nobody was paying attention to it. And that's where we thought, oh, Smart Brevity could work in almost any setting.

一年半之后，我们开始接到公司的电话， 有 NBA 还有初创公司， 他们的诉求基本上是一样的： “嘿，我们公司的高管和员工 都在读智慧简洁， 但是他们却不愿意读我们内部的资料，” 就这样我踏上了另一段旅程，探究为什么 让人们愿意读自己公司、 学校、初创团队的内部资料那么难。 原来，基本上人们 每天在各种场合输出大量 没人会认真看的文字。 然后我们想， 哦，智慧简洁可以作用于任何场景中。

So we get a call from the CIA, the head of the CIA. They call us, and they say, "Listen, can you guys come in and talk to our team about how spies can essentially give a much more crisper explanation of what they're seeing on the ground? Like, what are the threats? They're not great communicators. These messages are meandering."

这样， CIA 领导联系了我们。 他们说， “你们可以来教我们的团队 如何让间谍本质上更清楚地描述 现场看见的情况吗？ 比方说有哪些威胁？ 他们不太善于交流，给出的信息太迂回。”

So my partner goes in, talks to the CIA, explains the tricks and tips I’m going to give you in a second. And in the audience is a guy who writes the Presidential Daily Brief, and this was under Donald Trump, and he would write it, go in, and they would brief him. And he was so enamored with this idea of communicating more effectively that he quit and now works for us, teaching other people how to communicate more effectively.

这样， CIA 领导联系了我们。 他们说， “你们可以来教我们的团队 如何让间谍本质上更清楚地描述 现场看见的情况吗？ 比方说有哪些威胁？ 他们不太善于交流，给出的信息太迂回。”

I'm not blaming Trump. It's because of us, because of Axios. Around the same time, Jamie Dimon, one of the most famous CEOs of our generation, he writes his annual letter. It's 32,000 words long, about his observations on banking and on the world. 32,000 words is basically a book. So he's probably lucky if even his family members read it. So his staff calls us, and they say, "Hey, listen. It seems like you guys are good at getting people to pay attention to information. Could you do a Smart Brevity version of it?"

我没有说特朗普不好的意思。 是因为我们，因为值得。 同一时间，摩根大通 CEO 杰米·戴蒙（Jamie Dimon）, 我们这一代最杰出的银行家之一， 他写公司的年度信。 这封年度信有 32,000 词， 内容是他对银行业及世界的观察。 32000 词就基本上是一本书了。 所以如果他的家人 愿意读一读就很不错了。 他的员工联系到我们说， “看起来你们很擅长 让人们留意信息。 你们可以做一个 智慧简洁版本的年度信吗”？

So we took his most important points, turned 32,000 words into a couple hundred, and voila, they got much more engagement, much more traction in people seeing what's important, remembering what's important.

我们提取年度信的关键点， 将 32,000 词缩减成了几百词， 就这样，人们更加投入， 更能吸引人们关注重要的部分， 记住重要的部分。

So what I want to leave you with are what are some of the basic tips. Because you probably know, you're frazzled, you're distracted, you can see it. When you're trying to send a message, what are the things that you could do differently, starting today, to become a vastly more effective communicator?

这样，我想与大家分享一些基本的技巧。 因为也许你自己也注意到了， 你备受干扰、疲惫不堪， 你能看得到。 我们发信息时， 从今天开始，我们可以做出什么改变， 来大大提高沟通效率？

Number one, stop being selfish. Stop being selfish. What do I mean by that? So much of writing is self-indulgent. We write about what we care about, and we write at the length that we want to write about. We don't think about the whole purpose of it, which is what is the person that I'm writing this for, or talking to, what do they actually need to know? What do they actually care about? Reverse the way you think about communicating. At our company, the first two words of our manifesto are: "Audience first." How do you serve the people that you're trying to reach?

第一，不要自私。 不要自私。 这是什么意思？ 许多文字都太自我放纵了。 我们只写自己关注的事情， 自己想写多长就写多长。 我们不会思考写作的整体目的， 也就是我们写作或谈话的目标受众， 他们想知道什么？ 他们真正在乎的是什么？ 逆转你的沟通思维模式。 我们公司价值观的前两个词就是： “读者优先”。 如何效忠于你的读者？

The Holy Father himself has blessed this concept indirectly. So Pope Francis just gave a speech recently in Slovakia, where he was talking to priests about the homilies that they're giving. And he said, “You have to stop giving 30 and 40 minute homilies, and they should be 10 minutes. Because no one’s listening to you. You’re losing them. People don’t pay attention that long.” And he joked when he made the announcement that the loudest applause came from the nuns because, in his words, they're the ones who have to suffer through your long-windedness.

教皇本人还间接地认同了这一概念。 弗朗西斯教皇（Pope Francis） 最近在斯洛伐克的 演讲中对牧师们 谈到了布道。 他说，“你们不要再布道三四十分钟了， 十分钟就行了。 因为没人会听的。 人们会失去兴趣。 他们不会认真听那么长时间的。” 他还开玩笑说，他这么说的时候 尼姑们的掌声最激烈， 因为，他的原话说，她们 必须忍受你们的长篇大论。

So point two is: grab me. Whenever you're communicating -- again, I don't care if it's in an email, if it's a tweet, if it's a note, if it's a memo to a friend, grab me. What is the most important thing, the reason you're writing? What is that one thing, if you only had that 26 seconds I mentioned, what is the one thing you want me to remember about it?

那么第二点是：抓住我。 你在沟通时—— 再说一遍，不管是邮件、推文、便条， 还是给朋友的备忘录，抓住我。 最重要的一点是什么， 你写作的目的是什么？ 如果你只有我提到的 26 秒， 你会写哪一点， 你最想让我记住哪一点？

Which is related to tip three, which is: just keep it simple. Keep it simple. Like think of that one sentence, one sentence is better than two sentences. One paragraph is better than two paragraphs. Use simple, strong words. There's a reason you're taught a simple sentence structure when you're a little kid. It still works effectively today. It still works effectively. Keep it simple. If you're going to write about a banana, you're not going to call it an elongated yellow piece of fruit. You're going to call it a banana. If you're going to talk about someone lying, you're not going to say prevaricate, you're going to say lie. Keep it simple.

这样也就来到了第三点， 也就是一切从简。 一切从简。 考虑只用一个句子， 一句比两句好。 一段比两端好。 使用简洁有力的词语。 大家小时候学的都是 简单的句子结构， 这是有道理的。 这些简单的句子现在用也很高效。 现在仍然很高效。一切从简。 如果要描写一个香蕉， 不要写加长黄色水果。 就写香蕉就可以了。 如果要说有人说谎了， 不要用推诿，用说谎就好了。 一切从简。

Which relates as well to point four, which is: be human. Write like a human. I see this in journalism all the time. I don't understand what happened to our species that when you put a pen in our hand or a keyboard in front of us, we suddenly stiffen up, think we're a Harvard professor or we're Walt Whitman, and we try to show off in our writing. Like, if I was talking to you in the bar, I'm not going to use SAT words, I'm not going to talk in acronyms. I'm not going to use wordy clauses. I'm going to talk like I'm talking to you now. I'm going to talk like a human. So stop, stop using those big terms. You think that people think you're smart when you use them? They don't. They just want to throw a shoe at you.

这样就来到了第四点， 也就是：做个凡人。 像凡人一样写作。 我总是见到记者们这样。 我不知道人类这个物种是怎么了， 一旦手里有支笔，或者面前有键盘， 就非常僵硬紧绷， 自以为是哈佛教授，或美国诗人 沃尔特·惠特曼（Walt Whitman）， 想显示一下自己的文笔。 如果我要跟你在酒吧聊天， 我不会用美国高考词汇的， 也不会用缩略词， 不会用那些累赘的从句。 我不会像现在那样说话。 我会想普通人一样说话。 所以停下吧，不要用那些大词。 你以为你用那些词别人 会以为你很聪明？不会的。 他们只想拿鞋砸你。

Which leads me to point five, which is just stop. Just stop. The greatest gift that you can give yourself and others in this cluttered world is their time back and is your time back. Use as few words, as few sentences as humanly possible so that that person gets the message you want and you both get the time back that you deserve.

这就说到了第五点，停下吧。 停下吧。 在这个纷杂的世界， 你能给自己和别人的最好礼物 就是把时间还给别人，还给自己。 用越少的词，越少的句子， 越人性化越好， 这样读者就能获取你传达的信息， 你们都能拿回自己的时间。

And I can tell you this, I've seen it in my own life. If you just start to think about the efficiency of communication, if you put into practice a couple of the tips that I just talked about, you will see in your own mind that you start to think more clearly, talk more clearly, write more clearly. And you'll see ultimately that it's selfishly good for you because you'll be heard again.

我敢保证，我亲眼见证过， 如果你开始思考沟通效率， 如果你试一试我刚才提到的技巧， 你就会发现自己思路更清晰， 谈吐更流畅，写作更有条理。 你最终会发现， 这是对你自己有好处的， 因为你的声音能被听到了。

Thank you.

谢谢