Institutio Oratoria
Quintilian
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.
The statement of facts will be brief, if in the first place we start at that point of the case at which it begins to concern the judge, secondly avoid irrelevance, and finally cut out everything the removal of which neither hampers the activities of the judge nor harms our own case.
For frequently conciseness of detail is not inconsistent with length in the whole. Take for instance such a statement as the following:
I came to the harbour, I saw a ship, I asked the cost of a passage, the price was agreed, I went on board, the anchor was weighed, we loosed our cable and set out.Nothing could be terser than these assertions, but it would have been quite sufficient to say
I sailed from the harbour.And whenever the conclusion gives a sufficiently clear idea of the premisses, we must be content with having given a hint which will enable our audience to understand what we have left unsaid.
Consequently when it is possible to say
I have a young son,it is quite superfluous to say,
Being desirous of children I took a wife, a son was born whom I acknowledged and reared and brought up to manhood.For this reason some of the Greeks draw a distinction between a concise statement (the word they use is σύντομος ) and a brief statement, the former being free from all superfluous matter, while the latter may conceivably omit something that requires to be stated.
Personally, when I use the word brevity, I mean not saying less, but not saying more than occasion demands. As for repetitions and tautologies and diffuseness, which some writers of textbooks tell us we must avoid, I pass them by;
But we must be equally on our guard against the obscurity which results from excessive abridgment, and it is better to say a little more than is necessary than a little less. For though a diffuse irrelevance is tedious, the omission of what is necessary is positively dangerous.
We must therefore avoid even tile famous terseness of Sallust (though in his case of course it is a merit), and shun all abruptness of speech, since a style which presents no difficulty to a leisurely reader, flies past a hearer and will not stay to be looked at again; and whereas the reader is almost always a man of learning, the judge often comes to his panel from the country side and is expected to give a decision on what he can understand. Consequently we must aim, perhaps everywhere, but above all in our statement of facts, at striking the happy mean in our language, and the happy mean may be defined as saving just what is necessary and just what is sufficient.