Say it in 50 words or less

[blatherskite]

Or "fewer", actually, but that's picking nits this early on a Saturday morning and "less" is idiomatic.

I've often said that you can explain just about any topic in 50 to 100 words, though perhaps with some loss of detail. Practicing this trick offers a useful exercise in brevity, particularly for someone like me who often has to slash the Abstract of a journal manuscript by more than 50% to meet journal word limits. It's also a fun party game for a bunch of word geeks.

The Lol My Thesis site takes this to the extreme, with PhD candidates turning their thesis into a one-liner. (Some are actually two lines, but close enough. The links are clickable, but don't seem to lead anywhere useful.)

I have a certain fondness for "Fourth Wave feminism will occur in digital hyperspaces, amalgamating theory and activism into a new heterotopic praxis in which all previous feminist waves are subsumed", but admire the following more: "Astrophysicists don’t know that much about basic chemistry." Indeed they don't.