Less is more

From Causal Effects of Brevity on Style and Success in Social Media by Kristina Gligoric, Ashton Anderson, and Robert West.
From the Abstract:

In online communities, where billions of people strive to propagate their messages, understanding how wording affects success is of primary importance. In this work, we are interested in one particularly salient aspect of wording: brevity. What is the causal effect of brevity on message success? What are the linguistic traits of brevity? When is brevity beneficial, and when is it not? Whereas most prior work has studied the effect of wording on style and success in observational setups, we conduct a controlled experiment, in which crowd workers shorten social media posts to prescribed target lengths and other crowd workers subsequently rate the original and shortened versions. This allows us to isolate the causal effect of brevity on the success of a message. We find that concise messages are on average more successful than the original messages up to a length reduction of 30-40%. The optimal reduction is on average between 10% and 20%. The observed effect is robust across different subpopulations of raters and is the strongest for raters who visit social media on a daily basis. Finally, we discover unique linguistic and content traits of brevity and correlate them with the measured probability of success in order to distinguish effective from ineffective shortening strategies. Overall, our findings are important for developing a better understanding of the effect of brevity on the success of messages in online social media.

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They elaborate in the conclusions.

Our results reveal a causal mechanism through which enforcing brevity during the content production process improves the content’s perceived success. The initial question could also conceivably be framed the other way around: does asking workers to improve a tweet lead to the tweet being shortened? Instructing distinct crowd workers to improve a small subset of the original input tweets with the goal of making the tweet more retweeted, we observed that the workers chose to shorten the tweets in most cases, by a median of 16%.

We also discover that concise tweets have distinctive linguistic features. In the shortening process, verbs and negations survive the most, consistent with them being the parts of speech that convey essential information, while articles, adverbs, and conjunctions have the highest probability of being omitted. Also, shortened tweets preserve the original affect and subjective perceptions surprisingly well. This is particularly the case for all subtypes of negative affect (anger, sadness, and anxiety), confirming the general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena that negative emotions have more impact than positive emotions, and that negative information is processed more thoroughly than positive information [5]. These results, especially our finding that length constraints disproportionately preserve negative emotions, have immediate implications for social media content.

We associate various editing strategies with our measure of success to try to tell successful from unsuccessful strategies. We find that, for example, successful editing strategies include omitting certain quantifiers, articles and linkers, parts of speech that do not carry essential information, and inserting full-stops and commas to break up long sentences. We note that these insights are aligned with qualitative results pointing to simplicity, clarity and directness as desirable features of tweets (Fig. 8). Similarly, ineffective strategies are deleting hashtags, question and exclamation marks, a result referring back to the potential to initiate discussions, a frequently occurring justification when preferring control tweets. We emphasize that this analysis is suggestive and deserves further study, given that it was not performed as a randomized experiment (unlike our main analysis).

All just suggestive at this point, but entirely consistent with the received wisdom of such practitioners as George Orwell and Strunk & White.