If Brevity is the soul of Wit (as Shakespeake has Polonius tell us), how much of this soul can we expect in the age of electronic communication?

Not much, probably. Brevity requires more investment than verbosity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter”. Since in today’s overloaded work culture nobody has any time for anything, the tendency is to make emails longer than necessary, to the detriment of the hapless recipient.

There are three places where you see a combination of brevity and wit today. One is automobile vanity license plates: with only 7 characters to use, people get very ingenious. Another is SMS text messages, where the extreme constraints of a cellphone’s human interface, coupled with youngsters’ love of slang, lead to some gems. The third is Twitter, whose 140 character limit actually derives from SMS. Regular email, by contrast, remains high on length and low on literary wit.

The one exception, of course, is email written on handheld mobile devices: BlackBerries and other Smartphones. Typing on these devices’ tiny keyboards is hard enough to discourage long messages. The plain text messages that end in the brief sig “Written on my mobile device” are short indeed; whether they are witty – in today’s sense of “clever and humorous” or in Shakespeare’s of simply intelligent and to the point – varies a good deal, depending on the sender. At any rate, this is one redeeming feature of the BlackBerry where Information Overload is concerned: it may have wrecked our Work/Life barrier, but at least it encourages short messages that can be processed more rapidly.

I conclude with a strong recommendation: Whichever device you use for your mailing, do invest a moment in making your mail messages brief. It isn’t just a matter of Wit, or Soul: it’s that the likelihood of getting a rapid reply (or getting a reply at all) is inversely proportional to message length. Messages longer than a paragraph are that much more likely to be delegated for later reading – and that later moment may never come, with new mail coming in all the time. You have one chance at the recipient’s attention: don’t lose it by being too lazy to be brief. Throwing in some Wit, of course, is optional.