Brevity

I’ll begin with a John Dryden wrote: “If you be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”

Brevity includes the marvelous art of saying more with less. Most people appreciate writers and speakers who know how to be brief. That’s why shortcuts (or initialisms) like LOL, BTW, OMG, IDK, and IMO have become so popular. They get the point across in less time. In creative writing, wordiness (the antithesis of brevity) occurs when the author uses two dozen words to send a message that could just as well be conveyed with much less. And why should writers want to tighten their sentences? Because readers appreciate it.

Brevity, or tight writing, doesn’t mean constructing shorter sentences. It means writing sentences with few if any of the superfluous words or phrases that tend to weaken the scene, action, or story. Tight writing is rarely boring. Instead, it holds a reader’s interest because it gets in, piques interest, finishes the thought, and moves on. Authors who know how to ‘write tight’ have learned how to keep ahold of their reader’s interest so those readers will keep turning pages.

When reviewing someone else’s writing I sometimes sense the author’s wordiness may be the result of a poor vocabulary.  The author is writing around what they want to say because they don’t know there’s actually a word or short phrase that would do the job nicely with fewer words.

Wordiness is intensified by the use of passive verbs and overuse of prepositional phrases. It’s a good practice to scrutinize every ‘to be’ verb and each prepositional phrase. Sometimes there just isn’t a suitable substitute, but much of the time there is a better, tighter way to compose a sentence without them. I advise writers to reconsider any sentence that contains two or more prepositional phrases. Any number over two can certainly be rewritten without one or more of them; many prepositional phrases can be removed by creating a possessive (apostrophe + s).

I encourage authors to practice brevity, to learn how to convey the same message or conjure the same image or build the same tension while eliminating unnecessary words.

For examples of wordy sentences and how they might be fixed, check out this page from a Writing Symposium at Penn State: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog438w/node/342   

Happy writing!