This post was transferred from http://www.hebner.org

This is an addendum to my previous post, in which I gave President Abraham Lincoln most of the credit for the spare writing style used today in Twitter posts (I’ll never get used to calling them “tweets.”) and phone text messages.

Lincoln is as much a legend now for his oratory and writing as he is for his character and political decisions. However, his contemporaries were far more likely to ignore the technical nuances of telegraphy and subject beleaguered telegraph operators to long-winded and complexly worded messages, written in the literary style of the day.

Perhaps the worst offender, at least from Lincoln’s point of view, was Major General George B. McClellan, who was the second in a long line of indecisive generals, each of who led the Union forces briefly (and unsuccessfully) until the President finally found a winner in General Ulysses S. Grant. In May 1863, McClellan, in an egregious lapse of judgment, sent Lincoln a telegram from the battlefront that filled no less than ten pages. That tome would have taken about an hour to transmit and transcribe, monopolizing two telegraph offices for the entire time, at a cost to the taxpayers of about $100. At today’s values, that’s about $2,500! And we complain about wasteful military spending now?

Lincoln’s response was terse and immediate. “Your long despatch of yesterday just received,” was followed by only three sentences. (“Despatch” was a common and accepted alternative to “dispatch” during the nineteenth century.) Twitter style ruled, even then.

From a historical standpoint, I don’t think it matters much whether Abe deserves all the credit for Twitter style or not. It’s enough for us to acknowledge, as a culture, that we’ve been dealing with the technologically driven need to be brief and to the point for well over a century. Still, I never expected to find a guide for writing telegrams, especially one that prescribed exactly the style that I observed in both Lincoln’s telegrams and modern Twitter posts.

Recently, while cruising the Internet for websites devoted to the history of telegraphy (I don’t “surf;” I “cruise.”), I found a treasure trove of information at www.telegraph-office.com, a site operated by Neal McEwen. Among his many and varied resources, I found a digital copy of “HOW TO WRITE TELEGRAMS PROPERLY,” a booklet written by Nelson E. Ross and published in 1928. Here is a brief excerpt, in which Mr. Ross sternly rebukes long-windedness.

“Naturally, there is a right way and a wrong way of wording telegrams. The right way is economical, the wrong way, wasteful. If the telegram is packed full of unnecessary words, words which might be omitted without impairing the sense of the message, the sender has been guilty of economic waste. Not only has he failed to add anything to his message, but he has slowed it up by increasing the time necessary to transmit it. He added to the volume of traffic from a personal and financial point of view, he has been wasteful because he has spent more for his telegram than was necessary.”

Later in the same section, Mr. Ross states unequivocally:

“Brevity is the soul of telegraphy.”

Today, we could just as easily say that brevity is the soul of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, phone texting, Tumblr, Yammer, Linkedin (except for their group discussions), and all the other social media platforms. Mr. Ross’ advice still rings true, 82 years later. We would all do well to get to the point quickly and move on.

Paul H. Hebner
Originally posted August 14, 2010