Get to the point is advice we hand freely to other people and almost never take ourselves. It is worth taking seriously, though, because it turns out to name a real and near-universal failure, and to rest on a genuine principle of good communication. It also hides a trap. The point of a conversation is not always to make one, and the times we most need to get to the point are not the only times we think we do.
We genuinely cannot tell when to stop
Start with the failure, because the evidence for it is unusually clean. In a 2021 study in the journal PNAS, Adam Mastroianni and colleagues looked at more than 900 conversations and asked both people, afterwards, when they would have liked them to end. The two wishes lined up less than two per cent of the time, and about half the conversations ran on longer than at least one person wanted. Most of the rest ended too soon. Almost nobody, almost ever, got the exit right.
The striking part is that this is not rudeness or self-absorption. It is a coordination problem that people simply do not solve well, because we tend to hide when we want to leave, out of politeness, and so cannot read it in each other. Both people are often waiting for the other to close things off, and neither dares. Get to the point speaks to exactly this. We systematically overshoot, carrying on past the moment the useful part was done, and learning to notice when to wrap up is a real skill that most of us lack.
There is a principle underneath it
The advice also has a respectable pedigree. The philosopher Paul Grice described what he called the cooperative principle, a set of unspoken rules that make conversation work, and one of them, the maxim of quantity, says almost exactly this: make your contribution as informative as is required, and no more than is required. Get to the point is the maxim of quantity in plain clothes.
But Grice named three other maxims alongside it: be truthful, be relevant, and be clear. Getting to the point is only the quantity rule, and obeying it too zealously can trample the others. The blunt, minimal version of a message can be less relevant, less clear, and considerably less true to what the moment actually called for. Brevity is a virtue held in tension with several others, not a trump card.
When getting to the point misses the point
Which leads to the trap. A great deal of conversation is not information transfer at all. Catching up with a friend, comforting someone, bonding over nothing in particular, thinking aloud together until an idea takes shape: in all of these the point is the contact itself, and the wandering is the substance rather than padding around it. Deliver the headline and stop, and you would satisfy the maxim of quantity perfectly while failing the actual purpose completely.
So the real skill is not brevity but reading what a given conversation is for. When the point is information, a schedule, a decision, a request, get to it, because there the overshoot Mastroianni measured is pure cost. When the point is the person, the meandering is the message, and hurrying it along is the mistake. The instruction is right exactly half the time, and the harder task is knowing which half you are in.
Worse, the two purposes often share a single conversation, sliding from one into the other without warning. A call that begins as pure logistics can turn, halfway through, into the more important business of simply being in touch, and the person who treats the whole thing as a task to be dispatched will end it precisely when it was starting to matter. Reading that shift, and letting the conversation change gear rather than closing it down on schedule, is most of what good conversation actually is.
The honest version
None of this is a defence of rambling where brevity is wanted, which is most of working life. The meeting that will not end, the email burying its ask in the fourth paragraph, the answer that arrives three minutes after the question was settled, are real and common, and the research suggests we misjudge them constantly. If anything, the evidence says most people should get to the point more often than they do, not less.
The point about the point is simply that it is not universal. Match the length to the purpose, watch for both failures rather than only the long one, and remember that the same directness which rescues a meeting can quietly wreck a conversation whose only real purpose was to go on a little longer than it strictly needed to. Get to the point, then, but first work out whether there is one, and whether the point was ever the reason you were talking.
