To be concise is to say almost the same thing with less words (almost, because it is impossible otherwise). There are so many reasons why being concise is so great. People don’t want to hear you talking all day, for starters. But conciseness has some beauty to it; we relate more to what is conveyed through shorter sentences.

I thought for a while about why conciseness have this quality of being inherently good, and I realized the following: having approximately the same meaning in less words is achieving approximately similar results with less energy (from both ends). The amount of energy people are willing to spend is situational, though. For example, we like to spend more energy with people we love, so, maybe you’ve noticed, but we are usually more verbose with our loved ones.

The key word in the last paragraph is approximately. We obviously can’t achieve the exact same meaning with less words. This is different from optimal lossless compression because the listener does not know the optimal decoding algorithm. That is partly why concise arguments with stupid people can be ineffective. You have to be verbose enough so that they are able to decode what you say with high probability.

Compression of words, or their meanings, is ill-defined without taking context into consideration. The choice of the word itself—irrespective of its definiton—changes its connotation based on our unique associative experiences. Otherwise, summaries would just be called compression. People summarize differently because achieving conciseness is an ambiguous goal. The more empirical evidence you have of what conciseness constitutes, the more “acclaimed” your summaries will be, where “acclaimed” here is a subjective measure of goodness rather than an inherent one.