Be generous with the truth and economical with how you tell it. Most of us do it the other way round; that is the art of politics. Instead of doing politics with words—write. Mean as much as you can in the fewest syllables; that is the art of writing.
‘Concision is brevity relative to purpose’, writes Thomas Kane, neatly, if a little mathematically.
Less is more, I say. But, though this is one of the orthodoxies of style, particularly beloved of editors, I only half believe in it. In other hands this little red book would be much littler; but it would no longer be my book. Sometimes less is simply less. I believe in economy and grace and clarity; I believe in short words and tight phrases; it’s just that I don’t believe that half as long is always twice as good. Sometimes the long way around is the shortest way home. What counts is not how short a piece of writing is, but how useful and true and good. But if a thing can be said in ten words, you should try not to use thirty-five. Be thrifty, in other words. Didn’t I say that, already?
You could write, for instance, ‘Fold the pastry over to the other side so that it forms a semicircle’; or you could make it ‘Fold the pastry [over] to make a semicircle’. Tighter. You could write ‘Up to
two per cent of our body weight is made up of calcium, which is about 1.2 kilograms for a 60-kilogram individual’; or you could trim it to ‘Two per cent of your body weight is calcium—that’s 1.2 kilograms if you weigh 60 kilos’. You could write, very loosely, ‘The courses denoted in italics mean that they cover the key concepts specifically recommended for aspiring book editors’; or you could make it ‘The courses in italics cover concepts book editors need to master’.
There may be more than one route to the end of the equation, mathematicians and physicists know, but the best will be the one that uses the least chalk—the elegant equation is the right equation. The machine that performs the job using the least fuel, moving the fewest parts, making the smallest fuss, will—leaving aside a few sometimes significant matters of taste and habit and fashion—be the machine you want. We are talking about elegance here. What’s true for mathematics and farming and driving and dance, for instance, is also true for writing.
Keep your writing trim. Don’t make any moves you don’t have to; don’t double handle. Measure twice; cut once, as they say. Have no words in a sentence that do not pull their weight. Don’t qualify a statement unless you must.Try to use the most particular word or phrase you can, instead of the general one, even though this may cause you to add a word or two more. Say ‘orange’, even ‘Valencia orange’, not fruit; say ‘poet’ not writer; say ‘machinist’ not ‘worker’. ‘Make every word tell’, intoned old Will Strunk. Be clear, and use as many words as you need to do so, but not a syllable more.
Here are some ways to write more with less.
• Write ‘orient’ instead of ‘orientate’ and ‘specialty’ instead of ‘speciality’ and ‘rain’ instead of ‘precipitation’.
• Lose unnecessary prepositions and adverbs: write ‘retreat’ instead of ‘retreat back’ and ‘repeat’ instead of ‘repeat again’. • Drop ‘that’ wherever you can: write ‘there are three lines of
strategy we should pursue’ instead of ‘there are three lines of strategy that we should pursue’ (and while you’re at it, write
‘we should pursue three strategies’).
• Cut ‘field of’ from ‘field of study’ and ‘try to’ from ‘try to write the best book you can’ wherever you think you can.
• Write ‘because’ instead of ‘due to the fact that’ and ‘about’ instead of ‘in relation to’.
• Write ‘apply’ instead of ‘make an application’ and write ‘repainted’ instead of ‘undertook the repainting’.
• Drop ‘it is noted that’ or ‘we observed that’ or words to that effect from your reports. Once you start using such expres- sions, it’s hard to stop.
You’ll be surprised how much waste there is in writing you thought was tight. Clear the clutter. Replace it with some slender particulars. EB White writes that William Strunk so earnestly enforced his own nostrum ‘omit needless words’ that he often pulled up short of time when lecturing—even having repeated each austerely pruned sentence three times.
Don’t worry, though, that this exacting principle might stunt liter- ature as we know it.There will be plenty of books, and many of them will be long. It’s a standard we’re meant to fail at, I suspect, at least fifty per cent of the time. Anyway, the people who know most about conci- sion seem still to find a way to turn out healthy pieces of work.
Concision is a discipline to be practised at the level of the sentence; it gives rise not to short works but to works in which every phrase and sentence is trim, and every word is weighed carefully. It produces reports and novels and essays and memoirs made of apt, rich words; dour but heartbreaking phrases; pithy and elegant sentences; wise and shapely paragraphs. But you may have to drop every other word, and every other paragraph, sometimes every other chapter, to make it so.
Be careful, though: one word is not always better than five. ‘Computerise’ is not a shorter way of saying ‘install the computer systems we need’; nor is ‘implementation of diversified logistics
infrastructure’ a shorter way to describe in a full and decent sentence or two (with examples) exactly what that means. So conci- sion, as Kane reminds us, is a relative term. It’s hard to make your writing both short and clear. Clarity and brevity are nearly always at war. Make sure clarity wins. But do it without wasting a word.
Any reader will take the clear long piece over the short unclear one any day.
Some elongating usages to watch out for
the way in which [she spoke] Try the way [she spoke]
to the extent that [this matters] Try if [this matters]
as a result of the fact that Try because
owing to the fact that Try because
this is a [something] that is Try this [something] is
to make an application Try to apply
the refurbishment of the building Try to refurbish the building
to effect a tackle Try to tackle
it is recommended that training Try [the department]
be instigated should start training
he acted in an outrageous manner Try he acted outrageously
the writing of the book took Try the book took him ten
him ten years years (to write)
in the most efficient manner Try efficiently
I am going to go to bed soon Try I am going to bed soon
I am going to sit and try to Try I’m starting my book or I
start to write sit to write my book
she was tall in height Try she was tall
the question as to whether Try whether
at this point in time Try now
Beware useless modifiers like ‘actually’, ‘somewhat’, ‘virtually’, ‘almost’. And in the same vein, watch out for ‘tends to’ as in ‘He tends to write sentences that go on too long’. If the truth is ‘He writes long sentences’, write it.
Watch out, too, for ‘would’. People fall into using it, particu- larly when reflecting on times past, on childhood and lost love. We use it thus to generalise, and that rarely makes compelling reading. Ground your reflections (or whatever they are). Write, ‘Most mornings we went ...’ and ‘I remember the time we ...’. Cut out dead ‘would’.
Instead of vague modifiers like ‘several’ and ‘many’ and ‘a multi- tude’, try to state the number.
T RY T H I S
1 You won’t believe me, but this passage is for real. In fact, only the names, as they say, have been changed. See if you can think of a style principle it does not breach. In partic- ular, notice how wasteful it is with words, how stiff and passive and excessively formal. Can you recast it so it’s shorter and more lively?
Welcome to the website of the Diagnostic Ultrasound Practice of Drs. Peter Rabbit and Beatrice Potter. We have designed the layout and content of the site in such a manner so as to provide useful information to both referring doctors and patients attending the practice.
Information is included about our newsletter topics. We plan to release a newsletter to referring doctors on a twice yearly basis in which we will attempt to provide information about current topics of interest in obstetric and gynaecological ultrasound. We are also including patient information pages on obstetric ultrasound examinations and also pelvic examinations. We hope that this will help patients to prepare for examinations that they are soon to have referred. We are also providing information regarding prenatal diagnosis and the different types of tests available that are of interest to patients. We are also including a copy of our request form such that details may be entered to
assist in booking an examination. We hope that the website provides some useful and interesting information and we plan to update the site on a quarterly basis, hopefully adding some more interesting features.
2 Can you write these sentences more concisely?
I’m going to ask you to try to start to teach the kids to make an effort to try to finish their food.
I am delighted to have the honour of being asked to assume responsibility for the oversight of the day-to-day running of this wonderful secondary educational institution.
Conjure an image in your mind of someone caught up in the throes of first falling in love with someone else.
There has been notification from the board of MAG Publications, that there will be a restructure within the company: and therefore our internal resources will now be focusing on the core titles within MAG Publications, not including the gardening directory we first published last year.
In the family in which I grew up, one of the things we were always taught was that there was no material difference of any kind between the disciplines involved in the business of fly fishing and those involved in leading a good Christian life.