Beige Prose

"Omit needless words."

— William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, The Elements of Style

Brief descriptions, simple structure, short sentences, plain words, few figures of speech.

Effective if it works for a character, bad if it doesn't. Use carefully.

Compare Minimalism, Fun with Acronyms, Brevity Is Wit, Laconic Wiki, Understatement, IKEA Erotica. May be Boring, but Practical.

Contrast Wall of Text, Purple Prose.

Common in Private Eye Monologue or from a Terse Talker. Spock Speak is known for it.

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Examples

Advertising

• HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead. (Done because HeadOn is homeopathic, and can't make any medical claims in its ads.) Eventually included a second ad, where people lampshaded the first ad being annoying.
• Burma-Shave:
  A Miss
  A Curve
  He Kissed the Miss
  And Missed the Curve

  Burma Shave
• Many advertising spots end with various disclaimers being spouted in this way by a motor mouth.

  Dealer may sell or lease for less. Transport and preparation included. Taxes extra. See dealer for details.

  • For pharmaceutical advertisements, this may actually be half of the spot in itself.
• Ritter Sport, a German quadratic chocolate has a slogan in German that simply goes "Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut." - "Square. Practical. Good."

Anime & Manga

• In Violet Evergarden, Violet's stunted emotional intelligence due to her military background means her first several letters qualify as this. She ends up flunking a letter-writing course because her final assignment sounds like a military report, not personal correspondence. However, after connecting with her classmate Luculia, Violet manages to write a successful, but still very beige, letter to Luculia's shell-shocked brother on Luculia's behalf. Despite its incredibly dry wording, it has a powerful effect on the siblings and Violet's teacher decides to pass her instead.
  "Dear brother,
  I am happy that you are alive.
  Love, Luculia."

Comic Books

• X-23, an escaped Tyke-Bomb with few social skills, talks like this. For most of her childhood, she was trained to be a mindless slave who never spoke back or questioned orders, and her main occupation was one in which communication wasn't important. Her Beige Prose dialogue is likely the reason we never hear any narration from her perspective. (Before certain Character Development occurred, she didn't speak at all, implying that her ability to express emotions and concepts is gradually evolving.)
• An ad for A Death in the Family: "Robin is dead, murdered by the Joker."
• Cass Cain keeps her speech simple and to the point after learning to talk and read as a teenager since she was raised to be the perfect assassin and being able to talk wasn't one of the skills her father felt she needed.

Fan Works

• An entire sub-genre called "script format", by people who have no idea what a script is like.
• My Immortal. Except when discussing Enoby Ebory Ebola Ebony's appearance. Then it turns purple.
• legolas by laura: "and then one of the orcs striped her and then he raped her and then laura said 'go away you bastard'."
• Half-Life: Full Life Consequences and sequels (and pretty much anything else written by squirrelking). The fics don't even bother with describing things and only focuses on the motorcycle and boss fight action.
• soulless shell (Redwall)
  Ahh he yelled as he slashed him his blood hit the floor
• Mark Moore a.k.a. Tuxedo Mark writes some of his stories like this. Here's an example that's sometimes nicknamed "Linda! Laundry!"
  She got a plastic box off of the shelf in the closet and opened it. She put the comforter into the box and closed the box. She put the box back on the shelf in the closet.
  Linda put fresh sheets on the bed.
  She put the old sheets in the laundry basket.
  • Reads like fiction written by a computer, once offered in The Book of Lists II.
• Gurren Jesus, a crossover fic. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and The Bible. Makes it better.
• Anything by S-Michael.

• A good majority of what Incendiarist writes is in this style. Notable is Perennial Tears (Descend In Gems).
  Green light, unnatural shine.
  Voice grating, ethereal.
  Prophetic nightmare, she's terrified.
  ("What did I say?")
• The Darker Knight
• Calvin at Camp
• Mario & Luigi: Darkest Timeline: Most of the fic isn't like this, but the fight scenes specifically have very little detail put into them other than just very generally describing that they happened.
• Pretty much all of the descriptions in Sherlock Season 4 uses this. For example, this is the first sentence:
  Sherlock wsa seated at home typin on his compter stting on chair and solvin logic puzzles in hed.
• The majority of Ojamajo Doremi: Rise of the Shadows and its sequel is written with little, if any, description. The author does try to turn it purple during action scenes and whatever other scene is important.
  "Let me go!" Jou-Sama started to struggle in Evil Rin's hold, but it was no use. "Let me go!"
  "Fighting will do you no good." Black Queen said. "Besides, with you, my other prisoner won't be so lonely."
• Used to hilarious effect in Twillight Sparkle's awesome adventure.
  "You foal! Why did you capture Liara? She's just a background pony so Twillight will not care if I kill her." screamed Celesia and started to kill the guard.
  "No we captured the other lesbian called Rainbow Dash. The one who's part of the harmony elements." said the almost death guard.
  "Oh that are very good news so I'm not killing you." said Celesia and stopped killing the guard.
  "Thanks my Queen." said the guard and left the room and lived happily even after.
• Sephirothslave's Shinra High SOLDIER.
• Some of POV chapters in the Gensokyo 20XX series can be more or less written like this, depending on who is narrating and how much they have to say. In 20XXV, this is noted, when Reimu narrates chapter 87. She isn't very descriptive and neither are the sentences very long, although it is to show how detached from world that she is, as such a worldview doesn't give her much of an understanding, along with the fact that she doesn't talk much. However, Reimu will only narrate like that if a chapter demands.
• Every single story by ShakespeareHemmingway is Beige Prose to the max - but the Garfield fanfictions, such as Garfield: Royal Rescue, take things up a notch and have to be seen to be believed.
• Citadel of the Heart is this unintentionally; the author is actually intending for Purple Prose a majority of the time since he doesn't like being too simplistic, but what he ends up with instead is a bastard Fusion Dance of Beige and Purple Prose; too complicated to be beige prose, and too simplistic to be purple prose.
• Fledglings, or: Everything's Better With Penguins: The prose making up Tawaki Penguin's missions has minimal descriptions of things and a lack of narrative connecting the plot points. This has the side-effect of the setting appearing incredibly generic to the agents due to being underdescribed and the stories occurring at a rapid pace due to lack of additional prose to create more downtime between events.
• Horde Champion: Continuing from the trend of Orchard's work, there's little description and most narration is fixated on the characters' thoughts and feelings rather than the environment.

Films — Live-Action

• The Beast of Yucca Flats features a narrator who speaks almost entirely in Beige Prose, and is a pretty good example of how this can be done badly. “Flag on the moon. How did it get there?”

Jokes

• A German-Jewish joke (as quoted by Salcia Landmann in her book on Jewish humor) is about a Jewish landlord who will only let his tenant cancel the rental contract if the latter can express his desire in a single word. The following correspondence ensues:
  Tenant: "Judicium"^note  When pronounced according to the traditional German pronunciation of Latin, this sounds like "Jud' I' zieh' um" - "Jew I am moving". The Latin itself isn't very meaningful in this context
  Landlord: "Officium" ^note  When pronounced according to the traditional German pronunciation of Latin, this sounds like "Oh Vieh, zieh' um" - "Oh animal, move"

Literature

• Anton Chekhov. Very simple and beige. The description of mill dam under moonlight in short story "The Wolf" is classical.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • In Gold, a bunch of frustrated film writers desperately try to cobble together a screen adaptation of an Asimov story (The Gods Themselves), cursing Asimov's dialogue-laden, non-descriptive, and beige prose the entire way.
  • Due to the tight time constraints, "Insert Knob A in Hole B" is positively minimalist, using physically descriptive adjectives with emotional connotations to drive the viewer's imagination. Because he was performing in front of an audience when he initially wrote this story, he didn't describe the protagonists very much, relying on the fact that he was using his fellow panelists to tell the story.

• Ring Lardner's style derives from his journalistic background and has had a huge influence on many authors in the first half of 20th Century.
• Ernest Hemingway is known for his simple writing style that lacks flowery language and keeps descriptions to a minimum. He called it "the theory of omission" or "The Iceberg Principle." While some authors criticized him for it, his style is widely considered to be very effective. Hemingway himself attributed his terse style to his training as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Because he had to communicate from Europe to North America by the expensive medium of cable, it was naturally expected that he should compose his reports to be as succinct as possible while including all the story's salient information.
• Jack London wrote like this, partly because he had so much experience as a newspaper reporter. His reserved yet heartfelt style contrasted with the more Purple Prose usual in many newspapers at the time.
• Albert Camus' The Stranger. Done to ape Hemingway—Camus admired "manly" American writers. And Meursault is supposed to be emotionally detached.
• 1940s and 50s pulp novels. Readers wanted books full of plot, with no introspection or relationships. Writers were happy to oblige. Iconic example: James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice).
• The X-Wing Series:
  • Michael A. Stackpole. Great ideas. Plain description.
  • Aaron Allston, from the same series, is completely different. The shift is a bit shocking, moreso when it switches back.
• Parts of The Bible, especially Leviticus. Major stories and incidents, including Sodom & Gomorrah and the Tower of Babel, are dispensed and dismissed in 3-4 verses. The creation of man is summed up in a page. One time in the Bible, someone saves all the Israelites, equaling what Moses did earlier. This is told in two paragraphs.
• The Doctor Who New Adventures novel The Pit is written entirely in this. A good example comes early on, when a police officer goes from looking over the horribly mutilated corpse of a teenage boy to wondering what his wife's going to cook for dinner, with no change at all in the writing style. What might have come across as a nice bit of black humour in the hands of another writer instead just seems like a bizarre tonal shift.
• Terrance Dicks's novelisations of Doctor Who. Can be forgiven, since he was doing many, but it made them dull to read. His original novels can be better.
• The Book of Lies (1986) novel trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie). More commonly known by the title of its first novel, The Notebook, not to be confused with any other novel of the same name.
• Cash's sections in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. First section is a list of what to do to properly construct Addie's casket. Next two sections, the third being 1½ sentences long, are about the casket's imbalance.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four: In-story; "Newspeak".
• George Orwell in general prefers to write in this fashion; his five writing rules include "never use a long word where a short one will do", "if it's possible to cut out a word, then do so" and "don't write in jargon." Of course, when he does decide to expand himself, i.e Clover's internal monologue in Animal Farm, it's quite magnificent.
  • Burmese Days, Orwell's first novel, was also a bit of an exception, as it had quite a few Purple Prose sections in it, mainly descriptions of the Burmese landscape, local culture and various goods sold.
• Charles Bukowski tells you only what you need to know. Very rarely uses multisyllabic words. The times when he breaks those rules are powerful.
• Candide, by Voltaire, who manages to fit a 1,000 page epic story into just 75 pages, while still conserving the important details.
• James Ellroy. Early works aren't too bad, but White Jazz and Blood's A Rover and after? Every. Sentence. Is. Like. This. Brevity is one thing, but what about bookisms? When told White Jazz overran its intended length, he took out everything that wasn't Beige Prose. Made it short enough but hard to read.
• Shortest Science Fiction Story: "Time stopped. Yesterday" by David Gerrold. Shortest short story ever?
• Everything by Cormac McCarthy. His books, Blood Meridian in particular, switch between this and purple prose.
• "Knock" by Fredric Brown is an expansion of a 17-word horror story: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door." An alternate version ends with: "There was a lock on the door."
• Tao Te Ching, the text of taoism. One hundred pages in book form. Even shorter in the original Chinese. Spoken, modern speakers don't grasp it: the homophones.
  • Also notable for not simply for using Beige Prose, but also advocating its usage:
    "True words aren't eloquent; eloquent words aren't true."

• One could argue, though, that the author is parodying both of these tropes. The default narrator setting is "mockery."

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, being narrated by a simple zek.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, in virtually every sentence. You'd be hard pressed to find more than ten sentences with multiple clauses.
• Ronald Syme wrote The Roman Revolution like this: a book on the Republic's fall and the Empire's rise.^note Roman, not another Syme was writing like Tacitus.
  • In the words of my Roman History Professor: "Syme wrote in an abrupt, punchy style, writing sentences without verbs, or nouns, or sometimes even words."
• Mannie's minimal narration in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, intended as "Loonie" speech.
• Much of The Hunger Games series (the last two books in particular) are written with this. This is probably where the joke about the books being written entirely in sentence fragments comes from. It's used to demonstrate Katniss's emotional withdrawal, what with her living in Panem.
• Humorist Will Stanton would often lapse into terse sentence fragments in his written works. Still very funny.
• Kurt Vonnegut wrote in this style in a lot of his books, and it's very effective. In Slaughterhouse-Five we see a reason/parallel to it: He's imitating the writing style of his fictional aliens, the Trafalmadorians.
• Historical fiction author Ron Hansen's writing is a hybrid of this and Purple Prose.
• A key ingredient of Richard Brautigan's trademark style.
• The Dick and Jane series of beginning reader books, justified as they were sticking to a purposely limited vocabulary for young children.
  "See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!"
• Growing Around: Party Panic rarely bothers to describe the physical appearance of its supporting cast, and offers very little description.
• How NOT to Write a Novel has a few sections on this, showing how this can be done badly.
  "There were naked actors standing around the pornography studio: three women and one man. Two other actors were having sex on a bed. There were some cameramen filming them, who had their clothes on. There was a desk in the corner with papers on it, and a bulletin board with messages."
• Anne Rice did this once in one of the many story threads in Queen of the Damned. From Anne "Purple Prose" Rice, this was... unexpected, to say the least.
• Dear Mr. Henshaw: In the sequel Strider, Leigh Botts writes an assignment for his English class (based on his experience on the track) that runs on this, including sentences like "Sun shines." and "I rejoice."
• Iron Widow: Yang Guang in the prologue has bland, exposition heavy prose to show how emotionally detached he is to the suffering around him, barely noting his copilot's death or the emotions coming from the hunduns he's killing. It's a sharp contrast to the protagonist Wu Zetian, whose prose is both emotional and poetic.
• Don DeLillo's later works are these, compared to the jazz-infused rhythmic prose style of his previous works.

Live-Action TV

• Beetleborgs villain's description of last time they tried this plan: "Been there. Done that. Got beat."
• Blackadder the Third: The Duke of Wellington's report on the Penninsular War simply reads "We won. Signed Wellington."
• Screenwipe once did an hour special on writers. One of them was famed for writing realistic dialogue on EastEnders, his method was to write the sentence and then cut down any unnecessary words. So "See you later, we must do this again some time" would after a series of cuts simply become "Later".

Music

• Jon Lajoie's "I Kill People" rap is written this way to lay bare common rap subjects. Sample lyrics:
  I buy a lot of expensive things, because I have a lot of money
  You can't afford expensive things 'cause you don't have a lot of money
  Ha ha, you want these things, but you cannot afford them
  That means that you're not cool 'cause you're just a poor person
• The Minutemen's "Take 5, D.":
  Tub has to be properly caulked prior to any showering
  Walls are drenched
  Both roofer and plumber here
  Had to pay for two service calls
  • Lyrics taken straight from a landlady's note about a leaky bathtub. D. Boon thought Mike Watt's old lyrics for the song were "too spacey". He changed them to something mundane.
• The title track to The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails. The lyrics are sparse, spoken instead of sung, and are mostly bare description. "Eraser," from the same album, could count as well - it only has a few lines, all two words long with just a verb and a noun (either "you" or "me").
• Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man" summarizes his failed relationships in this style. It's devastating.
• The Beatles' "Love Me Do" contains only 20 different words, all of them simple if not monosyllabic. However, they take this to even more of an extreme with "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" and "Christmas Time Is Here Again."
• Nirvana's "School" contains only 15 different words and three different lines.
  • "Sliver" has significantly more words, but they're mostly monosyllabic, with the occasional two syllable word - the narrator is meant to be a young child with a pretty basic vocabulary. The chorus is the repeated line "Grandma, take me home", while the entire first verse is:
    Mom and dad went to a show
    They dropped me off at grandpa Joe's
    I kicked and screamed, said "please don't go!"

New Media

• Twitter posts #tvtropes
• Simple English Wikipedia. xkcd demonstrates.
• Plain old Wikipedia, when not talking about academic or scientific topics anyway, counts as well. The website aims to deliver information in a very straightforward and plain manner and heavily discourages editors engaging in Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness or writing Word Cruft.
• Even This Very Wiki invokes this trope. See Word Cruft, Laconic Wiki (especially Laconic entry on Beige Prose), Wiki Words, and CamelCase.

Poetry

• Haiku, the poetic form, is essentially this.
• William Carlos Williams.
  The Red Wheelbarrow
  so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow
  glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.
  
  This Is Just To Say
  I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox
  and which / you were probably / saving / for breakfast
  Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold
• This poem from Ogden Nash:
  Fleas
  Adam
  Had 'em
  • Also:
    I...
    Why?
• Some poetry by Yoko Ono:
  Water
  (Grapefruit, 1964)
• Epigrams, the Greek ones however could be a lot longer and almost indistinguishable from elegies. Modern ones are only a couple of lines long. The most famous one was written by a Roman named Catullus.
• This piece by Alexander Blok (translated from Russian):
  Night, square, apothecary, lantern,
  Its meaningless and pallid light.
  Return a half a lifetime after –
  All will remain. A scapeless rite.
  Then die, then have a new beginning,
  And all will turn the same as ere:
  Night, rippled water's frigid grinning,
  Apothecary, lantern, square.
• And from the master Richard Brautigan:
  crows / the
  crows / the
  (the tree)
  

Radio

• Dead Ringers: The main characters of Normal People speak in, as they put it, "infuriatingly spare dialogue". Usually in-between bouts of lots of sex. They do wonder if the show's writers get paid by the line or not.

Tabletop Gaming

• The Dungeon Master's guide for Dungeons & Dragons includes the advice "Sometimes, it's unavoidable to say, 'You miss. He hits. You take 7 damage.'" It's meta-commentary that not every action needs an elaborate set piece or Purple Prose; sometimes, you need to use beige prose to keep things moving at a decent pace.

Video Games

• The Bunnymen in Don't Starve are prone to this, always uttering single-word exclamations to indicate their thoughts.
• Final Fantasy XIII. Monster datalog. Inversion of Final Fantasy XII's Purple Prose bestiaries. Most monsters described as "Unremarkable".
• Sam & Max: Freelance Police: Agent Superball talks like this, Mr. President. Short sentences. No emotion.
• Mordin Solus in Mass Effect 2. Rapid delivery tends to mask.
• Sten in Dragon Age: Origins, to the point of annoying the player who wants more information.
• Tales Series
  • The summon spirit Shadow talks like this throughout the series, with sentences rarely going over three words. The party in Tales of Phantasia have fun imitating his speech style during a skit, while Sheena lampshades it.
  • Ludger of Tales of Xillia 2 is as close to a Heroic Mime as the Tales Series ever gets. He'll usually just call his attacks in battle or give vocal grunts. Whenever Ludger does talk, it's in short bursts of beige prose, like "yes"/"no", "okay", or "got it".
• Midbus's dialogue gimmick in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story.
• Subject Abathur. Advisor to Kerrigan. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. Talks like this. Other modes, inefficient. Also in Heroes of the Storm. Playable and announcer.
• A Dark Room combines this trope with the occasional jarringly uncommon or pretty word, to great effect.
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Dialogue is brief, with occasional abbrevs & odd syntax. Necessity of translation.^note Zelda II's dialogue was programmed for katakana, the American translation had to convey the same information in the same amount of characters, and katakana provides more information per character than written English.
• Sunless Sea is normally full of flowery, Victorian-style Purple Prose, but will delve into beige to punctuate certain events.
• In Trials of Mana, Kevin often speaks informally, but sometimes he instead omits words without also omitting context. In the case of the latter speaking style, when one of the villains, Malocchio, announces the plans to revive his leader, Dark Majesty, at the end of the Seaside Cavern, Kevin responds by saying "Who is 'Dark Majesty'? Why stop us?" instead of "Why do you want to stop us?" or "Why does he want to stop us?"
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents "Detective" mocks the original game's tendency to use this.
  You are outside. You can go north, south, east, or west.
  Mike: You know, it's the vivid descriptions that make this game come alive.
• In the Myst series, this trope is the main reason why Gehn's Descriptive Books are regarded as a Shoddy Knockoff Product in-universe, as Gehn treats the Art as a science instead of an art, relying too much on "formulas" and copied phrases to preserve his supplies of ink. As a result, his Ages tend to be unstable - the Age in which Riven is set is a prime example of this, with Atrus barely being able to keep Riven going just long enough for the Stranger to accomplish their mission and to save Riven's native population.
• Just about any game penned by the screenwriter Tadashi Satomi, known for the early Persona games and the Caligula titles, typically tend to be written in a very utilitarian manner with dialogue and text that is very to the point and only gives the player whatever info they actually need with finer details having to be discerned from context as well as generally only stating things once. This makes him very unusual in the space as he primarily works with JRPG's, games that often tend to be very verbose and at times repetitive.
• In Bonfire, the description for all Failure enemies is simply, "A failure." This is a striking contrast to other enemy descriptions which, while not terribly lengthy, are much more jocular and tongue-in-cheek.

Webcomics

• Used in The Order of the Stick for sending spells, which have limited word count. This strip is an example (spoilers within beware)^note Both the message and the reply are exactly on the limit - at 25 words. Words such as "we'll" and any ending with "apostrophe-s" count as one for the purpose of being a single verbal word.
  • Subverted for laughs with the Power Word spells. Despite being only one word long each, they take up dozens of pages.
  • Also, all spells, when cast, are simply the spell name shouted out.

Web Original

• The Gungan Council for some writers. For others...
• The SCP Foundation's files are written in a plain, clinical tone. It's very effective. Especially with SCP-4807, an infohazardous thing which can only be described in even-curter-than-normal phrasing and minimal formatting.
• The "Doge" meme. Wow. Such page. Many examples.
• Zero Punctuation for one episode. "Undertale is a good game." Yahtzee's review of the game in its entirety.
• The Rotten Tomatoes consensus tries to sum up the general critic opinion in few words. Sometimes, to the extreme: The Emoji Movie was "🚫".
• Formula 1: The fact that Kimi Räikkönen will never answer a reporter with two words when he can get away with one, and masterfully avoids any answer requiring more than three words at almost all times is pointed out in their "unofficial rules" video, where he gets his own rule: Never expect a long answer from Kimi. This "rule" applies to fellow Finn Mika Häkkinen as well.

Western Animation

• This is the entire shtick of "Blac-U" Weather forecaster Ollie Williams, from Family Guy. The man gets his weather forecasting across with this, and a combination of No Indoor Voice.
  Tom Tucker: We now go to Ollie Williams, for the "Blac-U" weather report. Ollie?
  Ollie: IS GON' RAIN!
  Tom Tucker: Thanks Ollie.
• American Dad!: Stan Smith lapsed into a similar pattern when he tried to get back into the dating scene.
  Stan: FOREPLAY THEN INTERCOURSE!
• The Transformers, both Soundwave and Omega Supreme: Dialogue limited.
• South Park: Butters's writing style in his book The Poop that Took a Pee.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The poetic stylings of Maud Pie:
  Rock,
  You are a rock.
  Grey,
  You are grey
  Like a rock,
  Which you are,
  Rock.
• This is part of Ice Bear's charm in We Bare Bears. When he speaks at all, his lines are brief, straight to the point, and completely deadpan no matter how silly.

Real Life

• telegrams charge per word STOP
• Text messages. Even with smartphones, people tend to send brief, direct communications.
• Twitter has a character limit, forcing people to be brief, but they'll often squeeze more words in with arcane abbreviations. Or they'll just do tweet threads to bypass this.
• Newsprint article titles, news copy in general.
• Low-word-count English reports.
• Manuals, memos.
• Dr. Nakamats speech upon getting the Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition:
  "Life should be lived long. Speech should be short!"

• The Spartans, whose simplicity of speech gave rise to the word "laconic," after the region they came from, Laconia (contemporaries called them Lacedaemonians). For example, when Philip II of Macedon threatened them with the message: "If we enter Sparta, we will raze all your buildings and ravage all your women," Sparta sent back the answer, "If." Philip, as well as his son Alexander, left Sparta alone.
• Calvin Coolidge, a.k.a. "Silent Cal." Apocryphal example:
  Party Guest: Mister Vice-President, I bet my friends over there I couldn't get you to say more than two words tonight.
  Coolidge: You lose. (he leaves the party)
  • Another example:
    After church one Sunday, notoriously terse Calvin Coolidge was asked what the preacher had talked about.
    "Sin", replied Coolidge.
    "What did he say about it?"
    "He's against it."
• Police reports.
• Many military messages. Good military orders are short, concise, and cannot be misinterpreted. Thus many military men often write in this style even in civilian life. Ulysses S. Grant is an example. Julius Caesar is another, placing him in distinct contrast to the Purple Prose favored by many ancient Roman authors.
• Simple English Wikipedia.
• Omit needless words.
• The artificial language Toki Pona based on Taoist philosophy of the virtue of simple thought, life, and communication. It takes this to pretty extreme levels - for example, "pona", the word for "good", is intentionally designed to also mean "simple", and "ike" for "bad" or "evil" intentionally also means "complicated".
• Guy Steele once gave a talk on computer language design, "Growing A Language", in which he restricted himself to using English words of one syllable, and allowed himself to use longer words only when he defined them first.
• San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich is known for speaking like this. Here's a sample interview:
  ESPN sportscaster Doris Burke: Pop, what happened offensively in that period?
  Popovich: Turnovers.
  Burke: What about on the defensive end? They had their most productive quarter, what'd you see there?
  Popovich: Turnovers.

  Interview ends.
• "The enemy came. He was beaten. I am tired. Goodnight." Vicomte Turenne, Message sent after the battle of Dunen, 1658
• Some Latin American Spanish dialects (like Mexican Spanish) tend to be rather straightforward when compared with European Spanish, which is often the exact opposite. For example, in Spain, people use the present perfect tense ("Yo he ido", "I have gone") much more often than the simple past ("Yo fui", "I went"), which is more common in Latin America. Although the former is technically the correct way to address certain past events, it's used so rarely outside of Spain that many native Spanish speakers are unaware that there's a difference. Spaniards keep insisting they're using the correct grammar, while Mexicans just wonder why they use so many syllables to get to the same point as they do with two (or sometimes one).
• People with Aphasia can have fragmented speech.
  • Alogia, or poverty of speech, is also a common symptom of schizophrenia.
• There was a long stretch around the mid-twentieth century where the prevailing literary orthodoxy decreed that everyone write like Hemingway (see above) and/or Jack London: Beige Prose and bleak realist stories about war, hunting, and other manly pursuits.^note Which itself was reaction to the late 19th/early 20th Century escapist Purple Prose detached from Real Life. Fashionable writing was constantly being described as "lean," "muscular," and other macho-sounding adjectives (because masculine is good and feminine is bad, right?). Many "genre" or "outsider" authors of the period from Tolkien to Mervyn Peake to the Beats cheerfully thumbed their noses at it.
• Law schools teach students to get to the point, avoid rhetorical flourishes, and cut any word that does not add meaning. Clients pay lawyers to convince tribunals that the clients' positions are right, not to impress the tribunals with eloquence. Also, the rules of practice often dictate maximum word or page counts and sometimes even require that page counts be met using specific line spacing and font size. This is serious business.
• The Webby Awards are famous for having a 5 word limit on speeches. Take Steve Wilhite's^note inventer of the .GIF format for example:
  Steve Wilhite: It's pronounced 'Jif', not 'Gif'.
• Victor Hugo sent a letter to his publisher about Les Misérables sales.
  The text: "?"
  The reply: "!"
  • According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the shortest correspondence ever.
  • And it was a telegram, not a letter, which makes more sense since you had to pay by the word.
• Classical Chinese is known for an extremely concise writing style. A text in Classical Chinese may have around half as many characters as it would if it were translated into modern vernacular Chinese.
• Most mathematical proofs tend to avert this due to the rigor required to make the proof foolproof. However, there are instances of very short proofs. One such example is "Counterexample to Euler's Conjecture on Sums of Like Powers".
  A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded
  27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵
  as the smallest instance in which four fifth powers sum to a fifth power. This is a counterexample to a conjecture by Euler [1] that at least n nth powers are required to sum to an nth power, n >2.

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Statler: That was the page?
Waldorf: It was dumb!
Statler: It was pointless!
Waldorf: It was obvious!
Statler: It was... short.
Both: I loved it! Do-ho-ho-ho-hoh!