It’s not the size of the tablet, it’s the length of the writing

Who invented the tablet?

God, that’s who – on Mount Sinai.

A case could be made for the industrious Sumerians, who carved cuneiform wedges onto clay tablets, which, held in the hand, look about the size and shape of an e-reader or smart phone.

Some of the earliest “mobile tablets” were cuneiform.

Artifacts suggest that Mesopotamians first put their tablets to agricultural and mercantile uses, marking the number of goats sold or taxes owed. Other purposes were imagined and clay tablet apps invented: a record of daily events, information about trade, astrological predictions, and eventually literature. (It’s hard to read that list of content areas and not think of Fred Flintstone reading “The Daily Slab.”)

Now back to God.

From two different Biblical versions (Exodus and Deuteronomy) we learn how God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, presenting the reluctant prophet with the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, carved on two stone tablets.

Which reminds me of an old joke.

“Why are there so many Jewish doctors?”

“Because God told Moses to take two tablets.”

Or was it two? Mel Brooks spins a different story. In his film “History of the World Part I,”  Moses, played by Brooks, delivers the law to the Jewish people, lugging not two but three stone tables.

“Hear me, oh hear me … for the Lord Jehovah has given unto you these Fifteen…” [Moses drops one of the tablets and it smashes into dust.] “…Oy! … Ten, Ten Commandments for all to obey.”

It seems that Moses inadvertently discovers a reliable path to brevity.  Revise and shorten your text not by compressing words, but by selecting a big part to delete – in this case, the third tablet.

“Wonder what might have been written on it,” asked my friend Matthew Solan on Facebook.

“Thou shalt not tug on Superman’s cape”?

Or “Thou shalt not spitteth into the wind”?

To understand the power and impact of short writing, imagine the tablet, and all the surfaces upon which short messages are delivered, as tiny or vast as the human imagination. They include everything from the sky, where a small plane might write “Marry me Susan” or “Eat at Joe’s.” They include human knuckles upon which the tattoo artist inks “BORN TO LOSE.” Short writing fills the need on postcards, business cards, shopping lists, Post-it notes, Valentine candies, Magic 8-Ball screens, and Chinese cookie fortunes.

The fortune “Aim high, time flies” can fit, in different type sizes, on a slip of paper or a digital billboard.

To decide when and how to write short, it helps to consider three dominant forces that will influence the form and function of our work.

Time

Available time always influences the length of a message. Say you are riding in a sports car and recognize someone on the sidewalk. You want to shout a message as you go by. How long should it be? You may not have time, even with the Doppler effect, to yell: “That’s a great haircut. Who does you hair and what did you pay for it?” You might, on the other hand, blurt “Great haircut” and earn a smile and a wave in return.

You are waiting for an elevator so you can descend to the lobby level. A door opens. The elevator is going up. Someone gets off and you notice an old friend standing in the back. The door begins to close. How long a message can you deliver in three seconds? “Still love you, Dawn?” Or “Meet me in the lobby?” Or, in a second, “Yo, Jack!”

It was French philosopher Blais Pascal who apologized for the length of his letters. His excuse? He lacked the time to write shorter ones. It may take a few seconds to blast out a tweet, but much longer to cut it down to 140 characters. In writing as in life, time can be a cruel task master.

Space

My wife and I had our wedding rings engraved, not with 140 characters, but with 14 (including the space): RPC-KLM  8/7/71. Why the cold numbers as opposed to the romantic spelling out of AUGUST? Because the surface was too small, we were poor, and Slud the jeweler charged us by the letter. Yes, it’s true: The cost of creating certain kinds of messages influences their length. You learn to write short when you are paying by the word (and long, if you can, when you are being paid by the word).

Fewer pages in newspapers mean a shrinking “news hole,” which means less space for stories. In a weak economy, publishers are more parsimonious than ever with the number of pages in a book. While crude graffiti of a few words may be scratched onto a toilet paper dispenser in a public men’s room, the true graffiti artist would prefer to tag an empty white wall, or the side of a subway train, or the underside of an overpass.

Give twins a box of crayons, a white bedroom wall, no supervision, and Voila!, they use up as much of the space as they can reach. Watched by mom or dad, they confine themselves to the size of the paper available, from index card to easel pad.

This 1953 photo by Walter Sanders (from the Life Magazine archives) shows a child drawing on the screen during “Winky Dink and You.”

Children of my generation will remember a remarkable television show called “Winky Dink and You,” perhaps the first interactive television show in history. Winky Dink was a cartoon character in the shape of a star who would escape from cliffhanger jams with the help of kids watching at home.

With the help of a plastic film that covered the screen, children could connect the dots on the television image and save Winky Dink from disaster by drawing a bridge over a chasm or a net below a tight rope. In spite of its influence on the likes of Bill Gates, Winky Dink went off the air after kids, lacking the special plastic covering, would deface their parents’ actual screens with bridges and nets.

Magic Slates are still available, most often with cartoon characters on the boards behind the drawing surface.

One of my favorite toys was something called Magic Slate, truly beautiful in its simplicity. About the size of an iPad, it had a light gray writing film covering a black undersurface. With the help of a stylus, or a fingernail, the young writer could write or drawn anything that would fit in the space. Much easier than an Etch A Sketch, the slate could be wiped clean by pulling the writing film off the undersurface. This was particularly helpful at writing short hostile messages to my brother Vinny: “You rot. You smell like dog shit.” Then, of course, when Vinny tattled, zip, the screen was clean, my affect pure innocence.

It may seem as if discussion of space would not apply to the almost infinite space of the Internet, capable of containing whole libraries of texts, on devices that can fit in your pocket. But impatient online grazers, surfers, and linkers may shrink the available message space to the size of a single screen, sometimes less.

Type size

What text has the biggest type size in my hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida? The standard size of a billboard is 14 feet high by 48 feet wide, and the letters, say “LOTTO,” can bleed over the top and bottom.  Our modest skyline lacks any truly tall buildings, but some office and bank buildings carry signage that can be read from a distance. My guess is that the big kid on the block reads “Tropicana Field,” stretched across the west side of the domed baseball stadium that is home to the Tampa Bay Rays.

The day I wrote this, August 1, 2011, was another day for big newspaper headlines, although only a fraction of the super-sized “Bin Laden Dead” announcements. The New York Times reported atop a page one story that

Leaders Declare

Deal Framework

To End Debt Crisis

The upper case letters measure one quarter-inch high, small enough to contain eight words in tight space. The St. Pete Times chose a type size seven times larger, one and three-quarter inches to be exact, but could only squeeze in three words: “Deal On Debt.”

Lest we forget, type size can be microscopically small, meaning a long message can fit on a small surface. I own the microprint edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, able to fit the original 12 volumes into two.  And I once bought for my mom a tiny cross. If you held it up to the light and peered into what looked like a small jewel, you could read the words of the Lord’s Prayer.

In summary, we write short for different purposes and different audiences. We also write on different surfaces, including tablets, a practice that began five millennia ago, but endures today and is hailed as an innovation.

To write short and well, the writer must take advantage of a dynamic relationship, a double helix of sorts that includes the dimensions of the writing surface and the size of the type face. In that space, and with those letters, the agile writer can deliver the most purposeful message.