When contemplating a new idea or writing a first draft, staying inside the box is usually bad advice.
It’s excellent advice, though, when delivering a final message.
Confining our writing to a limited space helps us focus our message and reduce the cosmetic.
For an essay, it might be two pages. An email might be a paragraph. On our resume, five bullets per job. A blog post…say…90 words.
Will we always stay inside the box? Probably not.
But that’s okay. 92 words on this subject are better than 500. Would you agree?