The Magical Number 4
LBJ's rules for effective communication: Keep it simple. Make it count.
I’ll make this quick, as LBJ would have wanted.
Over at the LBJ Library, there’s a great article about Lyndon B. Johnson’s communication style. He had a rule. And I’m already breaking it.
The rule was 4:
4 letter words
4 word sentences
4 sentence paragraphs
400 words max.
This is a tough rule to follow. But it’s good. Very good.
From the piece (emphasis mine):
LBJ had strong opinions about how a speech should be written. And brevity was a cardinal rule. For some reason, “four” seemed to be a magic number.
“Four-letter words,” he would say, “four-word sentences, and four-sentence paragraphs. Keep it simple. You’ve got to write it so that the charwoman who cleans the building across the street can understand it.”
[…]
It was also a rule-of-thumb that if the President had difficulty pronouncing a word—or thought he did—that charwoman certainly wouldn’t know what it meant. His longtime executive secretary, Juanita Roberts, used to tell about the time back in LBJ’s Senate days when one of LBJ’s aides wrote a speech for him to deliver in Houston. He seemed happy with it when he left Washington, but the next day, after delivering it, he was on the phone in high dudgeon.
“That was the worst speech anyone ever wrote for me.”
The writer was mystified. “What was the matter with it, Senator?”
“Matter? You filled that speech with words I can’t pronounce.”
“Words like what, Senator?”
“Like ‘eons’. You know I can’t pronounce ‘eons,’ ” he said, pronouncing it perfectly. “Besides, I don’t even know what it means. Dammit, if you mean ‘ages,’ say ‘ages.’ ”
But the magic number “four” did not end with “four-sentence paragraphs”—unfortunately. Unless he were delivering a major address—away from the White House—the President wanted everything written for him limited to 400 words—and not a word more.
His reasons were sound. He was a busy man and didn’t want to waste his valuable time delivering a lot of empty rhetoric. And, as a superb editor, himself, he knew that if you really put your mind to it, you could say just about anything you had to say in 400 words.
“It’s not easy,” he would admit. “It takes discipline to write succinctly. […] Anybody can write a long speech.” Then, he would tell us about the time Woodrow Wilson was asked how long it took him to write a speech. Wilson replied that it depended on how long the speech had to be. He said he could write a 60-minute speech in just a few hours, but it would take him a day or two to write a ten-minute speech.
That would be a normal ten-minute speech. Mr. Wilson did not reveal how long it would have taken him to write a ten-minute speech with four-letter words, four-word sentences, and four-sentence paragraphs.
You don’t just write a speech like that. You chisel it. You carve it. And when you finish, you start cutting—and your most beautiful prose usually goes first.
The President was right, of course. Writing a 400-word speech forced you to organize your thoughts, and disciplined you to write sparingly and clearly. If you did it right, you ended up with a little gem.
But it wasn’t natural. It went against a writer’s training. Anyone who has ever written a college term paper knows you are supposed to pad, not cut. It’s difficult enough, just putting a blank piece of paper into a typewriter. But to be limited to four-letter words, four-word sentences, four-sentence paragraphs, and 400 words—that’s cruel.
One Friday, after we had been at the White House for several grueling months, and had our first free weekend ahead of us, my colleague Will Sparks asked me what I was going to do with two whole days of free time. “I’m going to go home,” I said, “and do nothing for 48 hours but think in long, convoluted sentences.”
There was another problem. We were always working on such tight deadlines that we never had the luxury of spending a day or two, as Wilson had, to write a 10-minute speech. An hour or two was usually more like it.
So we cheated. We narrowed the margins, put more words on the pages, and pretended it was a 400-word speech. That didn’t work for very long. The trouble with cheating is, it knows no limit. Pretty soon, 450 words gave way to 500 words … then to 550 words … then to 600. Lyndon Johnson understood that all too well. He didn’t have a fixation about 400-word speeches as such. But he knew he had to draw the line somewhere. If he had just said, “Boys, keep them short,” he’d have been handed a State of the Union Address for every occasion—writers being what they are.
One evening I turned in a speech for the President to give the next day that had to be 600 words, minimum. That’s what did us in. The Old Man, becoming suspicious, actually counted the words. I’ve always had difficulty since then conjuring up the image of the most powerful man in the world going through his night reading and counting the words of a speech.
But he did. And he put a stop to our “overruns.” From that day on, whenever a writer turned in a speech, he was required to put his name at the top, and under his name the actual word count. It was the writer’s way of “certifying” that the speech was, in truth, under 400 words.
It was disaster time and we appealed to our chief editor and protector Jack Valenti. He was (and is) a brilliant writer, a great editor and a kindred soul. He could take a pencil to the drabbest sentence ever written, and with three or four swift strokes, make the words march and sing. (He also had a secret respect for long, convoluted sentences.)
“Jack, for God’s sake,” we pleaded, “we’ve got to have some flexibility. What happens if one of us has a 435-word speech and there is no more time to edit—if it has to be turned in right then? You can’t just chop off the last paragraph.”
Valenti stared off into space and thought. Then a smile played across his lips. “Fellows,” he said, “I know that the Old Man doesn’t really expect you to include ‘a’s,’ ‘and’s’ and ‘the’s’ as part of a word count. He doesn’t really think of them as words. So don’t count them.”
“That’s your official position?” we asked.
“That’s my official position.”
It was a small victory, but helpful.
All of this is not to say that brevity, to Lyndon Johnson, was more important than content. On the contrary. He could not tolerate purely ceremonial speeches. A speech, no matter what the occasion, had to say something; it just had to say it in 400 words. If a speech didn’t say anything, it was a waste of LBJ’s time, a waste of the audience’s time, and a waste of the reporters’ time who were covering the event. Above all, a speech had to have a news lead.
“Now there are three sure ways to get a news lead,” he told us—time and time again:
“Announce a new program.
“Make a prediction.
“Or set a goal.”
So there we have it. The magical rule of 4. Followed by: Have something worth saying before you open your mouth or set pen to paper.
Word count: 1,075, or 675 words too long.