“Long story short” never is

Despite a clear warning on the PainScience.com contact page that I “get a hundred times more email than I can possibly respond to properly,” it seems like every other e-mail is still like this:

To keep this quick, I’d just like to ask a few open-ended questions that would be hard to answer properly in less than a thousand words. Also, you should probably really know my entire story in considerable detail first.

What was the slow version? 🙄

Declarations of “I’ll keep this brief” actually predict verbosity. People who write brief email do not waste words promising to keep it brief. See also “long story short” — it won’t be!