 Hey there Astroplog fans, I love short papers. Like it or not, a lot of our productivity gets measured by the number of papers you write, how many papers are you publishing per year and a bunch of metrics that stem off of that, like how many citations do you get that nobody really thinks are good measurements for scholarly productivity but they're what is often used. I have heard of at least one job application that asked how many pages of scholarly material you've published and that's kind of interesting but also I think very regardless short papers clearly make economical sense for spending your time as a scientist because there's this ever-rising bar where you have to just produce more. There really can be a clarity of thought with short papers too that even a paper that drives home a single point can get filled with lots of extra details, a long winding introduction, multiple versions of the same figure, every single quality assurance plot that you've made. I like to think about what Michelangelo said of sculpting that there was always this thing, the art in the marble and his job was to remove the excess. I think this is true with papers, by the time you're writing your paper up you've done the science, the results are there. Now you need to take all the stuff you've done and remove the excess so that you're just telling the story that you want. As a reader I get overworked too, I have precious few hours in the day that I can sit and read papers and it's really hard to go through something that's 80 pages long. I know there's like a pushback against this that we don't want to just encourage the least publishable unit. If we do that then it cheapens our work that we won't dive deep and find the truths about nature and I accept that as a competing and powerful argument that says you should take your time and dive as deep as you can. But I also hate when good science is lost when it suffers from obscurity through locosity. If your amazing results are in section 15 on page 62 I'm gonna have a really hard time finding those results and citing you. It's hard. I can't read it all. My favorite joke on this comes from The Simpsons, it was pointed out to me by a college roommate. Lisa goes to Washington DC for a reader's digest writing competition and as she walks in there's a sign that says brevity is wit. This is a joke based on Hamlet. The actual line goes therefore which is a bad way of starting a sentence therefore since brevity is the soul of wit and tediousness the arms and flourishes and then goes on to basically say that Hamlet is mad. Polonius who loves the sound of his own voice which resonates with me. The joke in Shakespeare's Time is that Polonius is using all these words to make a big deal about how short of a point he's making. And a minute later the queen has the most snappy comeback and she says more matter less art. Hurry it up. Okay so the joke in our time of course is that reader's digest can condense and distill this down into just brevity is wit and you get the gist. Basically you understand the memorable quote you get the gist of the scene and that that's good enough. But of course it's not you don't get from that the substance of what the material is about or who Polonius is and from there if you go into a whole long discussion about public discourse and understanding of science. But brevity is wit and so the point is that when you're talking to other scientists less really can be more. This incidentally is why so many talks and posters are terrible because they go on and on about things without telling you the point. My favorite example of a brief but on point paper is Andrew Scumagge's 1972 paper about chromospheric activity in just over two pages and one figure lays the entire foundation for our current study of stars how they age how they spin and that there is an entire feedback mechanism here. It's basically a research note but now almost 50 years later it has 1300 citations and is remarkable for effectively connecting the field as Scumagge saw it then with all the available observations and made this insightful point which we're still working on today. Of course there's times when you need to be verbose when you need to say it all a phd thesis is a good example of this like you don't have to spare the pages but for me the takeaway for the everyday scientist is clear if you want to write more write less or as the queen very sharply put it more matter less art.