Tweak it

Last week my colleague made a very interesting point about students’ misconception that detailed information is contingent on the length of their written arguments rather than their content. To address this issue, she encourages them to be concise.

As I reflect on my teaching I realize that I help spread this myth of detail and wordiness. Many students in my class write shorter paragraphs that lack detailed analysis. Up until now I have always asked those students to write MORE information, but I think the time has come for me to change my pitch. 

The abundance of information has shaped us for good and for worse. On a daily basis we are submerged with information in the form of emails, text messages, blogs, videos and much more. In this context of overwhelming abundance, conciseness and loquacity become essential survival skills determining whether our message will be absorbed or discarded by our audience. 

In his new book “To Sell is Human”, Daniel H. Pink highlights the purposefulness of conciseness when pitching ideas to our audience. Interestingly enough, a university now uses 140-character responses from applicants as one of the criteria in their selection of future candidates. The character limit is a constraint that requires that students be resourceful and creative in their responses.

So I cannot help but question how my students would perform with these constraints if they were applying at the Tippie Business School at the University of Iowa. More importantly, how would my students perform in the real world were succinctness will be central for their survival? Knowing my students and their teacher, my guess is that many of them would find it challenging to say the least.

So my plan is to expose my students to this kind of process. In the next month, I will expose students to a suitable, real-world challenge that needs to be addressed in not more than 140 characters. It will be interesting to go through the process of elimination, starting with a long text and slowly trimming it down to 140 characters. In this way students will appreciate that conciseness does indeed accentuate the message. 

So I guess I ought to lead by example. Tonight, I will be tweeting this reminder to myself:

Detail is not defined by the lengthiness of an idea but by its essence.