The Gettysburg Address: A Lesson in Brevity

The main speaker at Gettysburg that afternoon was not Lincoln. Edward Everett, the most celebrated orator in America, spoke for two hours. Lincoln followed with roughly two minutes — around 272 words, depending on which of the five surviving manuscript copies you count. Only one of those speeches is remembered, and the reason is worth spelling out for anyone who writes for a living.

It isn’t simply that short beats long. Everett’s oration was good; you can still read it, and almost nobody does. What Lincoln did was different in kind, not just in length. He refused the inventory. No regiments named, no generals praised, no battle narrated. He stated what the occasion meant and stopped. The speech even contains a prediction that turned out to be exactly wrong:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

The world forgot the battle’s choreography almost immediately and has never stopped repeating the sentence that said it would. The humility was doing rhetorical work, but it also records a real editorial decision: Lincoln cut everything that was merely true about the day and kept only what was essential to it.

Everett saw it plainly. He wrote to Lincoln the next day: I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes. That may be the most useful note one writer has ever sent another. The central idea of the occasion — finding it is the whole job. The two hours or the two minutes are just what it costs you before you do.

The practical lesson holds for any draft: before polishing sentences, name the one idea the piece exists to deliver. Everything that doesn’t serve it is Everett.