Henry David Thoreau had a version in 1857: “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” Ben Franklin and John Locke also had their own versions. The oldest provable attribution comes from French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in 1657, who wrote, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”Īs harried legal professionals, we know that speed tends to produce errors and verbosity. Great minds throughout history felt this problem. There is no writer who would not benefit from an editor and no writing that would not benefit from tighter phrasing or the removal of redundant and duplicative words (see what I did there).

The lawyers I know like to read and write. The profession attracts folks who like researching and writing, hence the outsized number of humanities majors in our ranks. One of my favorite quotes is the apocryphal Mark Twain quote: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” Were it a TV series, the quote would be described as “based on true events” rather than a genuine quotation. But the phrase and its sentiment go back much farther than Twain in 1871.

Wordrake for lawyers