Smart Brevity emphasizes that today’s readers have limited attention spans and that writers will benefit from catering to this fact. In other words, meandering and long-winded prose is ill-suited for gaining the attention of modern readers, who do not read much content, preferring instead to scan and skim. The authors aim for the book to be a kind of modernized version of Strunk and White’s seminal guide The Elements of Style, albeit tailored to fit the needs of busy contemporary readers; in this sense, much of what the book has to say about certain principles of writing, such as the active voice being preferable to the passive, is nothing new. The book generally addresses the natural instinct many people have to say more in an effort to be heard and understood, making the case that, especially in the digital age, less is more.

However, yielding to current trends may not necessarily produce better writing. In a review for The New Republic, Colin Dickey points out that the authors of Smart Brevity concede to information consumption trends. Dickey accuses the book of adopting an

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