Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter – Mark Twain

About ten years ago I was working on a project where we were writing career descriptions. We were supposed to describe the steps a person would take to learn their job, train themselves, and do ever increasing work for the group. Nice thought, but I digress.

I worked hard on my part. I showed it to the manager who shook his head in disgust.

“This was your chance to really write something about being an engineer. All you could come up with was this?”

He pointed to the brief descriptions I had written and the long descriptions of other professions that other people had given him.

I sat puzzled for a moment, then it hit me. “Oh, you think that because what I wrote was short that I didn’t try hard.”

For the next hour, I tried to explain that my part was short because I had worked long and hard on it. Being brief, concise, clear – those things were not easy to do. My explanation fell on deaf ears. The manager handed my writing back to me and shook his head from side to side.

I returned to my office, retrieved my first draft, which was twice the length of my final product, printed it, and waited two days. I gave the long first draft to the project manager. “Yes,” he said as he held the pages in his hands moving them up and down as if weighing them, “this is much more like it. I knew you could do it if you put your mind to it.”

Sigh. Gosh. What’s the use?