WRITERS DIVERSE AS MARK TWAIN TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT TO Voltaire to Oscar Wilde have all gotten credit for having written this famous postscript to a letter: "I'm sorry this letter is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter." That little nugget of wisdom hits those of us who write for a living squarely where we live: on the blank page before us. Get rid of unnecessary words, get to the point, don't get derailed.
Mary Baker Eddy understood this. She worked tirelessly to clearly and concisely convey the ideas in her seminal work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Thousands of revisions over 30 years! In fact, she spent almost all of her last decades honing her far-ranging, life-altering, divinely revealed metaphysical ideas into accessible, pithy sentences that people could grasp and then use to better their lives.
Today in our world of cyber-speak and sound bites, brevity might seem an entirely modern invention. But 2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth grasped this concept and delivered his radical teachings in the most plain-spoken, unadorned, and compressed style of his age: He told stories. These parables, about 40 of them recorded in the New Testament, include accounts of shepherds, householders, dinner guests, and references and comparisons to such simple objects as a humble fig tree or lost coin. But each parable, usually told in just a few verses, powerfully reached the hearts and minds of his listeners—and thereby changed the course of history.
