One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got came in a course on business writing that my company offered. This was a long time ago, but as I remember, the person who taught the course, Padraic Spence, had once worked as a reporter for a small newspaper. Every time he turned in a piece of copy, his editor expected to see a red dot over every word in the piece. This indicated that the reporter had touched each word with a red pencil and asked himself, “Is this word necessary?” If the answer was no, it got crossed out.
My initial drafts tend to be wordy, and I’m always impressed by how much shorter a piece of writing gets as I revise it. As the writing gets tighter, it gets better. Adverbs are the first to go. For example, when I first typed the quote in the previous paragraph — “Is this word necessary?” — I wrote “Is this word really necessary?” When I went back through the paragraph I realized that the word “really” wasn’t (really) necessary.
(The above sentence “Adverbs are the first to go,” by the way, was originally “Adverbs are the first things to go.”)
I also often find I’ve written a phrase that can be replaced with a single word. The sentence above, “It’s our job as writers to find a different adjective” was originally “It’s our job as writers to come up with a different adjective.” Three words became one.
“Very” is the likeliest candidate for removal, though I’ve gotten pretty good at not using it to begin with. Is there a material difference between “It’s not very far” and “It’s not far”? No. And if we judge the adjective as insufficient without the “very,” it’s our job as a writer to find a different adjective. Instead of “very upset”, we can say “distraught.” Instead of “very exciting,” we can say “exhilarating.” Mark Twain reportedly said, “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
This is fun. I like the examples. It was nice that you told one on yourself!
Excellent Paul. I will put this to use. Thank you. I was news editor of my h.s. paper and journalism served me well throughout my business career. For example: “Who, what, where, when, why and how” deserve top billing. Every admin I (ever) had learned how to write a business letter with me.
Caryn
As a writer myself, I struggle with this still. I just finished editing two emails for a client, and took out a LOT of extraneous words … it seems to be easier to clean up other people’s work than my own!
Very nice, Paul. I really got a lot out of this. There’s something kind of nagging at me, though, as if I never really grasped whatever the thing might have been that you were trying to get across. It could be that the objective of your post was to facilitate cognizance of redaction methodologies in the pursuit of efficient communication via this thing we call writing, or maybe you meant to suggest that shorter is always sort of better and that it should to some extent be preferred over more circumlocutory ways of saying the exact same things. I couldn’t quite tell. Oh, well, live and learn, and no use crying over spilt milk. But thanks for a really good post!
Excellent suggestions. Writing well is hard. Suggestions like this are helpful.