THE VERDICT:A message for irate readers: Keep it short, please

From time to time, I receive a letter from a reader.

Most of the time, they are short, just a comment saying they knew somebody I had written about or remembered an event. The exception was a letter I once got from a lady, four single-spaced pages of irate language about something I had written. I felt like I’d gotten the “War and Peace” of letters, which leads to one of my favorite subjects — brevity in writing.

While others may think of the invention of gun powder or the development of the atomic bomb as the most woeful moments in human history, my own choice is the abandonment of the goose quill pen. With the effort it took to write with a quill pen — all that dipping and blotting — one thought carefully about each word and wrote with economy.

People don’t seem to realize the beauty of brevity. On that immortal day at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln used 279 words in his address. The man who shared his podium delivered a two-hour memorized oration. Most of us can recite the Gettysburg Address, or at least part of it. Can anyone even remember the subject of the other speaker, or for that matter, his name?

With the invention of the typewriter, the dictating machine and wordprocessing computers, brevity has become a thing of the past, a lost art. When the state of California installed word processors in the appellate courts, the opinions of my fellow justices increased in length, if not in substance, by about 20%. Theoretically, when word processing, one can add or delete with ease, but human nature being what it is, one seldom deletes.

I am a great believer in writing by hand. If one dictates, one tends to fall in love with one’s voice. On the Court of Appeal, I wrote all my opinions in longhand. As a result, mine were the shortest, although admittedly not the most erudite, opinions in the state, a matter much appreciated by those who had to read the damned things.

It was only when I could no longer read my own handwriting that I moved to a typewriter, and my typing is so lousy that I’m forced to go almost as slowly and, I hope, as precisely as if I were writing by hand.

Speaking of letters, I sent a guy to prison for rape. For many years, he sent me a Christmas card with a simple, four-word greeting: “Wish you were here.”

Now that’s the kind of message one remembers.

Another was a simple postcard that said, “You sex-crazed maniac, how could you turn loose that sex fiend McCracken?” The card came a few years after I had tried, convicted and sentenced McCracken, a sex murderer, and he had been duly executed. Still, it was a memorable missive — brief, to the point, succinct, even if a few years late.

Somehow, I remember those. The only thing I can remember about the four-page letter is that the writer was mad.

However, there may be hope. Just as computers have encouraged wordiness, they may also be a force to counter the problem. I have no experience with e-mail, but I have been told that more and more people communicate by this method and that such communications are short and to the point. If that’s the case, then I may have to look into it because I can’t face another four-page, single-spaced letter. Not at my age.