ADVICE FOR ACHIEVING BETTER CONCISENESS

Adapted from John Trimble’s Writing with Style

by Adam Vramescu

“Most of us write as if we’re paid a dime a word” (53).

HE RESULT IS vague writing (lots of passive voice, needlessly protracted sentences, empty intensifiers, expletives and impersonal constructions like “there is” and “it is”)

Conciseness is saying only as much as you mean to say, avoiding wordiness or repetition.

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Tests for conciseness:

1. Have you repeated a word a number of times? Could you find synonyms? Cut the word in some instances? Combine sentences so you don’t have to use the word?

2. Have you repeated an idea? Occasionally we write two sentences in a row that say essentially the same thing. Make sure each sentence answers a question posed by the preceding one rather than simply restating it.

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Tip: Verbs are your best tool to say exactly what you mean, so have you used the clearest (not the fanciest) verb possible?

Sometimes clear verbs already lurk in disguise as nouns.

Ex: “Hamlet’s feeling for his father’s death is grievance.”

Find the lurking verb… How about grievance? Grievance = grieve.

So… “Hamlet grieves his father’s death.” Much simpler!

Eliminating Unnecessary Modifiers (or, the road to Hell is paved with adverbs)

Are you using specific words? What do the following words mean?: very, definitely, extremely, truly, ultimately, honestly, etc. The answer: not a whole lot.

Instead of “the desert is very hot,” why not “the desert is scorching”?

Instead of “I ate the pie quickly,” why not “I devoured the pie”?

Empty intensifiers actually dull the effect of the word! To a reader, “very hot” doesn’t really mean “more than regular-hot.” It reads more like “very zzzzzzzzz…” So remember to use descriptive language! It’s more precise and more fun to use.

Myth: Longer sentences are more intelligent than shorter ones. The truth is that sentences don’t have brains and, as such, can’t be intelligent. But in seriousness, let’s think about this: Are long sentences more refined than shorter sentences? We actually think in longer phrases—Trimble calls them “ready-made.” He goes on to say that since these phrases have “the added attraction of sounding elegant,” they don’t seem intuitively bad. But!—“This habit of thinking in prefab phrases slowly dulls our sensitivity to words as words” (53). So what’s the harm? Try these bad boys of diction: Wordiness, repetition, cliché.

 

  1. Usually, you can use the fewest and simplest words possible.

 

Fact #1: There’s a shorter way to say it. Keep an eye on your connecting words, especially. Prepositions, conjunctions, and the like. They’re usually hiding something.

  1. Sometimes they’re symptomatic, as in this case: “He fought with great honor.” Nothing bad about the word with, itself. But it’s burying an adjective, “honorably.” So why not “He fought honorably”? Incidentally, the word “great” wasn’t a loss to be mourned, if you remember the section on empty intensifiers from the “Saying What You Mean” handout.

  2. Sometimes they’re just longer than they need to be. Look at these pairs: to/in order to, if/in the event that. Any loss in meaning by trimming the fat? (If this seems petty to you, remember that we’re developing a bag of tricks to deal with wordiness; occasionally you’ll prefer “in order to” for the flow of the sentence, but make sure you’re not just doing this because you want to sound more elegant. An ostrich in a tutu might also think she’s elegant.)

Here’s some typical sentence protraction, from WWS: “His bold and brash temper has been replaced by a careful and prudent manner.” Where’s the repetition there? Check the whopping four adjectives. The sentence was “His impetuosity has been replaced by prudence,” still not a gem but not a clunker.