On being concise
By Doug Fisher
It is
perhaps delicious irony that teaching brevity takes two
sessions of my copy-editing course. Didn’t Strunk
and White boil it down to the well-chosen phrase: “Omit
needless words”?
The devil,
of course, is in the details. What seems needless to me
might not seem so needless to you. I have a perfectly edited
version of the Gettysburg Address in my files. It reads
like dry toast.
But writing
concisely is more important than ever. Forget all the derision
in years past of “McPaper.” A top editor at
a large Midwestern newspaper told me recently, “The
most important thing you can teach is how to take a 15-inch
story to 12 inches.”
New technology
seems determined to shove more into less. Cell-phone text
messages being used to expand news companies’ reach
give you about 255 characters to work with; we still aren’t
completely sure about the best way to use that real estate.
A Web page screen is about 22 lines long, and plenty of
admonitions are out there against going much longer than
that. Fewer than a third of readers follow most stories
past the jump, so if you aren’t writing to get as
much in before the jump as possible, you’re asking
not to be read.
The problem
with writing concisely is that we sometimes confuse conversational
writing with the way we speak. When we talk, body motions,
facial expressions and other nonverbal cues provide context
and help carry us past the rough or convoluted. Writing
must be more precise. The TV weather forecaster can get
away with “downtown area” or “rainfall
event.” But write that, instead of just “downtown”
or “rain,” and the reader needs a bit longer
to digest it.
A good
copy editor easily can trim 5 percent to 10 percent from
many stories. Find those places to seamlessly trim two or
three words, and eight to 10 of those is a column inch saved.
Along
with “The Elements of Style,” consider “The
Dictionary of Concise Writing: 10,000 Alternatives to Wordy
Phrases” by Robert Harwell Fiske (Marion Street Press,
2002). Fiske also runs The Vocabula Review Web site (www.vocabula.com).
The articles require a modest subscription, but the links
page is free – and valuable. (Fiske’s companion
volume is “The Dimwit’s Dictionary: 5,000 Overused
Words and Phrases and Alternatives to Them.”)
Here is
some wordiness culled from newspapers, magazines, and radio
and TV newscasts during two recent weeks. One way to avoid
things like this: Always test your writing by asking “as
opposed to?” (Lag behind – as opposed to lag
in front? Lag will do just fine.)
The Common
Sense Journalism Conciseness Guide (in no particular order):
