It has been demonstrated that interactive natural language dialog is remarkably unruly, with many misspellings and grammatical errors. Although progress has been made in getting computers to process pristine English text, the day when computers will be able to process unlimited interactive natural language dialog is still very far off.The vast majority of the effort that has gone into designing interactive natural language systems has concentrated on the computer half of the human-computer dyad. Our approach concentrates on the human half. Specifically, the goal of our research is to define a human engineered subset of natural language that retains all of the user-oriented benefits of unrestricted natural language dialog, while greatly reducing the processing burden that true natural language interaction places on the computer. This paper is a preliminary examination of the possibility that these criteria may be satisfied by simply asking usres to be concise.