Conciseness

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An expression is concise if it has a high level of meaning despite its brevity. The opposite of conciseness can be found in expressions such as awkwardness, long-windedness or inaccuracy.

General

The word is derived from the Latin adjective praegnans for “pregnant” or “pregnant” in animals. In a figurative sense it means “filled to the brim” or “bursting with content”. The concise description of a situation dispenses with filler words and empty phrases and comes straight to the essential point.

example

The speaker presented the economic situation of the company with extraordinary conciseness.
This means that the situation of the company was presented briefly and accurately, so the lecture was limited to the essentials.

Communication psychological determination

If the length of a text is related to its content, a statement can be made about its "degree of conciseness". The shorter and more meaningful a representation, the more concise it must be viewed. In order not to jeopardize the comprehensibility of the text, the target group and their level of (prior) knowledge must be taken into account in the formulation.

According to Friedemann Schulz von Thun (1981), the opposites brevity and conciseness on the one hand and verbosity on the other hand represent the two poles of text features under the aspect of their comprehensibility.

Classic rhetoric

In rhetoric today, conciseness refers to a stylistic figure of semantic emphasis in which a simple term is used in such a way that its connotations are the actual carriers of meaning, while a purely literal understanding would lead to a truism : For example, “He is a true man ”means“ He is brave and brave ”; "Children are children" means "Children are unreasonable and playful".

additions

Gestalt psychology
  • The verb impregnate [= to make a material (e.g. textiles, wood) weatherproof] goes back to the same Latin root and means in the original sense of the word to get pregnant .
  • Classical Gestalt psychology formulated several Gestalt laws of perception. One of them is the law of conciseness . It says that in a large number of elements, those are first perceived that stand out from the others in one or more properties.
    In this context, the term conciseness is to be understood more in the sense of “being highlighted” or “conspicuous”.

literature

  • Express yourself understood , Inghard Langer, Friedemann Schulz von Thun, Reinhard Tausch, 1974
  • Psychology of Knowledge Management , Silke Frieda Heiss, Wolfgang Schnotz, 2004

Web links

Wiktionary: concise  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations