The internet has become a jungle. When I search for something on Google, I have to hack my way through cookie notifications and useless SEO content with a machete, without ever really finding an answer to my question. Frustrated, I thought: there must be a better way.
Smart Brevity as inspiration
The idea for Brevity arose after I read the book Smart Brevity by Axios. In it, the authors explain how to communicate more effectively by streamlining your message. The book is full of practical tips and rules for making your point concisely and powerfully, such as:
- Determine your core message in advance and leave out anything that doesn't contribute to it
- Use active sentences and strong verbs
- Make it visual with lists, headings, and highlights
I immediately applied these principles to my own communication. But I was still annoyed by the long texts you encounter online. Then I realized that I could also incorporate these principles into a prompt. I decided to translate the principles of Smart Brevity into concrete instructions for a language model.
Building a system prompt
This seems simple. "Write a summary of this text." But to get a clear summary in the 'Smart Brevity' format, you have to do a bit more prompt engineering. For the prompt, I was able to reuse many things from the book. I made a short description of each rule with an example. The interesting thing here is that the model performs better if you explain why it should adhere to a particular writing rule. If you instruct the model to use bullet points, it's important to substantiate why you're doing that. This will greatly improve the consistency of the result.
"❌ Use bullet points in the summary"
"✅ Use up to three bullet points per section to support the most important aspect. These bullet points serve as an explanation of the most important aspect of the article and are important for the readability of the summary."
In addition, the prompt also contains a number of example results. Here, I apply the few-shot principle; I give the model a number of example summaries so that it knows how I would like my results.
End result
The result is a simple tool that converts anything you encounter online into a concise, clear summary with a well-defined structure. Grab a piece of text, a link to a website or article, a YouTube video, or upload a document, and Brevity gives you a clear and concise summary.
Try it yourself at brevity.sh.