In rounding up the day’s top business stories for the SmartBrief newsletters, the last thing I have to do each day is find a punchy quote that we can pull out to close the brief — and I’m always amazed at just how tough that task can be.

All those thousands of words, and no one can put together 15 or 20 that stand on their own and really pack a wallop.

In this day of 160-character communications, it’s more important than ever to deliver short, pithy soundbites. The reason is simple: Other people don’t have time to do your editing for you. If you bury a perfectly good point under mounds of useless words, someone has to do a lot of digging before they can pass along the good stuff. Who has time for that?

There’s a reason that everything Seth Godin writes is shared like crazy across the Internet. The guy is more quotable than Bartlett’s. You want 62,000 Twitter followers? He’s your model.

So whether you’re writing an email, a blog post or even a full article, think in terms of stand-alone quotes that convey your meaning in just a few words. You’ll get more links, more clicks and more business — and you can quote me on that.