Ladies Skirt Rule is a maxim on the length of 📝cogent writing: a piece should be "short enough to be interesting, but long enough to cover the main topic."

The formulation is anonymous and considerably older than most of the people it gets credited to. Quote Investigator traces the earliest strong match to May 1920, when a columnist in the Buffalo Enquirer set the line in quotation marks — a signal it was already in circulation — and versions were appearing in print by that October. Winston Churchill is the most common attribution, on the strength of a 1942 New York gossip column, and the priest Ronald Knox is credited in several books with a sermon-specific variant; no citation has been found in the printed work of either man. The metaphor has been applied indifferently to speeches, sermons, editorials, and essays, which is part of why no single source can be fixed.

What the rule actually specifies is proportion rather than word count. It sets two bounds at once: a floor, below which the subject goes uncovered, and a ceiling, above which attention is lost — and it declines to name either in absolute terms, because both depend on the topic. That two-sided structure distinguishes it from 📝brevity, which measures compression alone and can be satisfied by a short piece that says nothing. The device that makes the rule memorable is also its liability: a standard for prose built on the appraisal of women's clothing, which is why it now tends to be repeated with a caveat attached.