Axios-ese makes my head hurt

The last thing we need is for others to adopt its dialect.

I have a confession to make. I wrote about Smart Brevity, Axios’s new style guide, without reading every last one of its Strunk-and-White-on-acid 218 pages. I read about half of them. I will say in my defense that my latest New Republic piece isn’t a review of Smart Brevity (TNR already ran one by Colin Dickey) so much as a critique of Axios itself and a discourse on the inadvisability of others adopting its uniquely irritating dialect. Especially the corporate world, which is just about the last place anyone wants to be direct and to the point in reproducible prose. Not if they want to keep their jobs, anyway.

I tried to read the whole thing, but I just couldn’t. I don’t think anyone can. I’m not even sure reading it cover to cover would honor the spirit of the enterprise, which is to grasp the point and move along, there are other points waiting behind it. People who read Axios (and Smart Brevity) are supposed to be very busy. My ultimate complaint about Axios is that its abbreviated hyperbole dotted with boilerplate like “zoom in” and “be smart” (!) doesn’t speed the reader up, as it’s supposed to; it slows the reader down. I had a similar problem a few years ago with journalism’s much-vaunted “pivot to video,” now largely a thing of the past. Where the hell did anybody get the idea that I had time to watch television during my workday? Similarly, where did anybody get the idea that I had time to read Axios’s ugly little haikus three times to figure out exactly what they say? Click here to read my critique, which includes an obligatory nod to Wolcott Gibbs.