Brevitas is a

rhetoric Rhetoric () is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate parti ...

al style

Rhetorica ad Herennium The ''Rhetorica ad Herennium'' (''Rhetoric for Herennius''), formerly attributed to Cicero or Cornificius, but in fact of unknown authorship, sometimes ascribed to an unnamed doctor, is the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, dating from th ...

calls "the expressing of an idea by the very minimum of essential words." By implying more than is said, it is distinguished from tautology and

understatement Understatement is an expression of lesser strength than what the speaker or writer actually means or than what is normally expected. It is the opposite of embellishment or exaggeration, and is used for emphasis, irony, hedging, or humor. A partic ...

. Brevitas is related to

concision Concision (also called brevity, laconicism, or conciseness) is a writing principle of eliminating redundancy.UNT Writing Lab. "Concision, Clarity, and Cohesion." Accessed June 19, 2012Link./ref> For example, this: * "It is a fact that most argum ...

parataxis Parataxis (from el, παράταξις, "act of placing side by side"; from παρα, ''para'' "beside" + τάξις, ''táxis'' "arrangement") is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, without conjun ...

sprezzatura ''Sprezzatura'' () is an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 ''The Book of the Courtier'', where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear ...

, and elliptic style. It contrasts with

periphrasis In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one infl ...

aureation Aureation ("to make golden", from la, aureus) is a device in arts of rhetoric that involves the "gilding" (or supposed heightening) of diction in one language by the introduction of terms from another, typically a classical language considered to ...

and

pleonasm Pleonasm (; , ) is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as "black darkness" or "burning fire". It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria and might be considered a fault of style. Pleonasm may also be used for em ...

References

{{reflist Rhetorical techniques