杰夫·贝佐斯坚持使用完整的句子。去年11月，作家本·卡斯诺查写道，亚马逊（Amazon）CEO杰夫·贝佐斯不允许管理团队在交给他的会议纪要中使用要点罗列的方式。贝佐斯的要求是在段落中正确断句，不能一目十行地看。他的理念是，如果必须以书面形式完整地阐述你的想法，将有助于想法的完善。

    卡斯诺查指出：“贝佐斯要求团队将句子写全，是希望团队成员能全面思考每个想法，从而让这些想法更能经受住时间的考验。”《财富》杂志（Fortune）近日刊登了一篇贝佐斯的专访，文中贝佐斯谈到：“如果没有想清楚，根本写不出长达6页、架构清晰的叙事备忘录。”卡斯诺查前述文章的灵感正是来源于此。

    乍一看，这一规矩有道理。但完整的句子真能解决要点罗列法的弊端，杜绝空洞堂皇的词藻堆砌吗？如今在商业沟通中，议论文很多时候被误以为就是用七年级英文老师口中的“助动词”将一堆抽象概念连起来，很多语法正确的句子都不知所云。举例来说：

    为了提供市场最佳客户体验，打造与众不同的技能组合，赋予相关机构知识、技能和内部强化，我们设立了五项至关重要的目标。

    或者是下面这封刚刚发到我邮箱的邮件。

    设计师们致力于想象和创造空间、体系、语言、工具及基础设施，为每个人和我们这个世界提供特定的关系与倾向。

    这样的句子主要给我们一点感觉，知道大概讲的是什么事情。主旨可能显而易见，但细细读来你可能会想，如果用更少的字来说，少一些故作姿态呢？我用了好一会儿才意识到这些完整的句子基本上都只是改头换面的要点列表。将所有这些词塞入同一个句子或许有道理，或许没有。往往很难分辨这样一个句子的各个部分是如何联系起来的。

    会不会问题不在于句子不完整，而在于我们用罗列法表述繁复庞大的想法时，罗列不能胜任沟通之目的？过去我们常常会罗列一些东西，这样就不必老惦记着。（做完一件事或买好一件东西，就把它从列表中删除，然后把这个列表也扔掉。）列表本来就是用完就扔的东西。

    现在，我们使用列表是因为我们觉得我们的想法过于复杂，用简单的几句话难以说清楚。《哈佛商业评论》（Harvard Business Review）撰稿人克雷格·莫科恩在最近的一篇博客中指出，现在不满足于一个头衔的人越来越多。这可以理解，但并不聪明，他指出：

    现实稍微有点残酷：在任何一个特定时间，我们在其他人的脑海中只能“占据”一个位置。人们不能同时将我们认为是项目经理、教授、律师、保险经纪人、编辑和创业家等等全部。这些头衔可能全都是真实的，但人们首先只能想到一种职业。

    给你自己6个头衔，商务社交网站LinkedIn和SEO培训师当然会鼓励你通过这种方式跨界发展。但要知道，当人类(（而不是机器人）查看你的简历时，他们可能会很困惑。

    Jeff Bezos insists on complete sentences. In November, the writer Ben Casnocha wrote about how the Amazon (AMZN) CEO doesn't allow his executive team to hand him memos dotted with bullet points. Instead, Bezos demands correctly punctuated sentences that live in paragraphs and defy easy scanning. The idea is that having to spell your idea out in full will improve it.

    "By demanding his team write everything out," Casnocha remarked, "he makes them consider all aspects of an idea to make it more durable for years to come." In Fortune's recent profile of Bezos, which inspired Casnocha's post, Bezos said, "There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking."

    At first glance, this rule is appealing. But are complete sentences really a fix for those bulleted lists that essentially clump together vaguely smart-sounding noun phrases? A lot of what passes for persuasive writing in business communication today are pile-ups of abstract concepts strung together with what our seventh-grade English teachers called "helping verbs," and plenty of grammatically correct sentences are still mystifying. For example:

    In order to accomplish a best-in-market customer experience, instill a differentiated skill-set, and bring the relevant institutional knowledge, skills, and facilitation expertise in-house, we have identified five mission-critical goals.

    Or this one, which also recently landed in my Inbox:

    Designers work to envision and create spaces, systems, languages, tools and infrastructure that afford specific kinds of relationships and predispositions towards each other and our world.

    Such sentences mainly give us a feeling for what they're about. The topic may be obvious, but a close reading prompts an urge to question whether it could have been said with fewer words and less grandstanding. It took me a while to realize that these complete sentences were basically gussied-up laundry lists. There may be a good reason to house all those concepts in the same sentence -- or not. It's often hard to tell how all of the sentence's parts relate to one another.

    So, what if the problem isn't incomplete sentences but the fact that we are using lists to convey big, unwieldy ideas that lists aren't capable of communicating? We used to list items so we didn't have to think about them. (Do or buy a thing, cross it off the list, then throw the list away.) Lists were disposable by design.

    Now, we use lists because we imagine our thoughts or abilities are too complex for one or two simple descriptors. In a recent blog post, Harvard Business Review contributor Greg McKeown noted an increase in the ranks of people who wouldn't pick one job title. This was understandable but not so smart, he argued:

    The slightly painful truth is, at any one time there is only one piece of real estate we can "own" in another person's mind. People can't think of us as a project manager, professor, attorney, insurance agent, editor and entrepreneur all at exactly the same time. They may all be true about us, but people can only think of us as one thing first.

    Give yourself six job titles -- LinkedIn and SEO trainers certainly encourage you to spread your bets that way -- but know that when humans, not robots, read your profile, they'll likely be overwhelmed.

    这就像软件中的“功能蔓延”，我们可以称之为罗列蔓延。出发点可能是好的，但效果不佳。越是对“罗列蔓延”敏感，我就越担心我们的讨论可能是鸡同鸭讲，不断往上堆积，导致初衷迷失，浪费时间。

    我问过《减法法则》（The Laws of Subtraction）的作者马修·梅，把很多想法硬塞进一个句子的冲动来自哪里？他将此归咎于缺乏自制。“如果没有自制，本能就会占据主导，”他说。“我们的固有本能就是添加，掌握的东西越多，我们就越感到安全。”

    竞争性工作环境下，塞入过多沟通内容往往比遗漏更安全。但梅说，这种自我保护的本能可能弊大于利。

    “具有讽刺意味的是，世界的注意广度正在收窄。我们要想继续有人听，就必须得花点功夫。写微博和短消息或许能让我们成为更好的编辑。我们想通过这样的自制，形成中长期模式。”

    如果您担心自己可能已感染上了“罗列病”，不想进一步陷入毫无逻辑的境地，一种办法就是检查你的名词:动词比率。（像上述这样的10:4比例，表明废话过多，行动不足。）

    梅建议不妨预设一个限值，即便这在一些同行看来可能有些草率。“我通常以3为限。我想这是大多数人能够做到的。当然，最理想的情况是1。”

    另外，建立一套固定的修改流程也有帮助。梅表示，他会在段落中快速浏览每次出现的“和”，而且尝试把“和”后面的部分删除。但他也说“不一定每次都能做到”。热和闷改成热，后面是句号。

    决定哪些略过不提并不是件容易的事。正如贝佐斯所言，这需要想清楚。它意味着需要孤立和整体地评估各个要素的重要性。

    博主克里斯多夫·莱福写道，它还意味着感受一下稿件的份量。是的，就是字面意思的份量，他还记得到好莱坞工作时见到的一个奇特传统。“制片人或审稿人拿到剧本的第一件事就是本能地拿起来‘掂量掂量’。真的就是掂量一下。”

    太重了？莱福写到：“这样的剧本很少有人仔细阅读，可能连看都不会看。”

    当然也会有例外。但如果你可以将一个项目从列表中划掉，或许你的确应该这么做。

    Like feature creep in software, what we might call list creep is insidious. The intentions may be good but the effect underwhelms. The more sensitive I become to list creep, the more I worry we waste time talking past each other, perpetually tacking on one more "thing" and only making our intended meaning blurrier.

    I asked Matthew E. May, author of The Laws of Subtraction, where the compulsion to stuff multiple ideas into a single sentence comes from. He faulted a lack of self-control. "Without the discipline, instinct takes over," he says. "Our hardwired instinct is to add, as slack resources make us feel safe."

    In competitive work situations, overstuffing your communications often seems like a safer bet than running the risk of leaving something out. But that instinct for self-preservation may be doing more harm than good, says May.

    "The ironic thing is that the world's attention span is shrinking, so we're going to have to do the work if we want to stay relevant. Twitter and texting may be inadvertently making us better editors. We just need to apply that discipline to our longer formats."

    If you're worried that you've succumbed to list creep, one way to halt your slide into incoherence is to check your memos for noun: verb ratio. (A 10:4 ratio like the one above implies a lot of conversation, not enough action.)

    May recommends setting predetermined limits, even if they strike some colleagues as arbitrary. "I try to follow the rule of three. I think that's the most people can retain. The ideal is one, of course."

    A routine revision process also helps. May says he scans his paragraphs for every instance of the word "and." Then he tries -- "not always successfully," he adds -- to eliminate what follows each "and." Hot and sticky becomes hot, period.

    Deciding what can go unmentioned is hard work. It involves, as Bezos suggested, clear thinking. It means assessing the importance of each element in isolation and as part of the whole.

    It also means getting a sense for how heavy -- literally -- a document should be, writes blogger Christopher Rife, who recalls witnessing a strange ritual upon arriving for work in Hollywood. "The first thing a producer or reader would do with a script, instinctively, was to pick it up and 'weigh' it. Literally weigh it."

    Too heavy? "It ha[d] little chance of being read with care or read at all," Rife writes.

    There will always be exceptions. But it's tempting to recommend that if you can cross it off your list, you probably should.