Our world has creative minds and mediums like Odyssey and blogging sites to allow for the explosion of public information, but most are conveyed ineffectively. On average, YouTube analytics show that audience members are either captured or lost during less than the first 4 minutes of a 20-minute video. The same heuristic can be applied to text media. While the audience judges 25% of your content, it's not very hard for them to make preconceptions if the paragraph is not interesting enough, or just long and cumbersome like "The Office" after Michael Scott left.

I've taken a Business Writing class that focused on conveying the message appropriately, shortly, and powerfully (all the elements of brevity), while I have also taken an Intensive Latin class which has shown me all of the defects of the English language. Every time I speak, it's a struggle to keep cases and tenses the same. English only has three (Subjective/Nominative, Objective/Accusative, Possessive/Genitive) while Latin has six along with a secret Locative case (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative, Vocative), and don't forget genders!

Take a look at the next paragraph, then compare it to the following paragraphs and read the explanations as to what was changed and why.

"Combining the elements of the previously discussed duo, it makes it easier to speak and convey the most amount of information possible in the smallest amount of time allocatable. Seriously, if he didn't write as long as they did, it would have been a much more valant efforted. That is the problem with much of the people's writing today: is that they don't take the time to go back and re-write it and edit for mistakes. As my Business Professor, who is a genius, she said this: 'There are no first-draft masterpieces'. I took that piece of advices wherever I go now, and it is all thanks to them that my writing is better."

How ironic, that last clause to end off quite possibly a rather poor-written paragraph. Here is the revised version:

"Combining the aforementioned elements, it's easier to convey the most information in a short time. It would be a much more valiant effort if people didn't write as long. A problem in contemporary writing is the lack of time for editing. According to my business professor, "there are no first-draft masterpieces". I now take her advice wherever I go, and as a result my writing has improved."

Let's reference the first paragraph version when discussing corrections. Beginning the paragraph, we have a long sentence so we pull out the most relevant information and eliminate the rest. The second sentence has a gender & number disagreement, improper spelling, and improper tense in the word "efforted". Next is a sentence with a lot of articles that can be taken out and streamlined more, also the colon usage can be eliminated. In the fourth sentence, an ablative of characteristic is conveyed by the appositive poorly and it does not enhance the main point, which means it should be removed. Tenses are not in disagreement, but there are just too many switches. Finishing off the paragraph is quantity confusion in regards to "advice", and both a gender & number disagreement ("Business Professor", F. Sg., to "Them", N. Pl.) while "has improved" demonstrates pluperfect tense meaning that the action had recurred in the past.

After the grammar is corrected, we can substitute words for brevity and cut out any unrelated sentences. We can further improve the paragraph by looking at what the beginning and ending sentences have in common, rewrite the body, and end with an even smaller paragraph - why not throw a causal "if" statement there as well?:

"If we combine the aforementioned elements, it will be easier to convey more information faster. If people didn't write as long, they would have an easier time. I heed the advice of my business professor, who says "there are no first-draft masterpieces".

In today's busy world, brevity is key. If you are writing or drafting correspondence to someone of importance, please take the time to read over your initial response and KISS (keep it short & simple, a mnemonic device). Don't say because you know how to tweet you can be brief, because usually the grammar, syntax, and punctuation cannot be accurately represented in 140 characters or less. Take your time and write out all your thoughts, pick out the most important pieces while disposing the rest, and then re-write that stanza. Keep doing it until you're satisfied. Then click "Send", or "Post" and bask in your grammatical glory.

I did revise this article according to the above steps. It does work, and can work for you.