I’m all for brevity and impact. I’m sure you are if too you’re a regular reader of blog posts. It would be awful to fall foul of TL;DR syndrome, which is Too Long; Didn’t Read if you didn’t know.

My favourite exchange, the most brief an impactful example of dialogue I can think of, which could work for letters, emails, chat and so on, is the following:

From: Someone

To: Someone Else

Subject: Re: ?

!

(That’s it; this isn’t part of the exchange.)

In other words, to the question ‘how did it go?’, comes the reply, ‘It went great!’, in the most economical way possible.

Sometimes, punctuation can be so effective, it can be used instead of words, like this…