Chapter 6
The Art of Brevity
I know learning how to write poorly wasn’t easy. It required years of suffering through misinformed instruction and the steady application of poor practices. Establishing a bad habit is like driving a stake into a dry riverbed: hard to embed and even harder to uproot.
Yet uproot I shall try.
This chapter is about how to write well. I’ll start with the principles that guide good writing and then illustrate how they work in practice. In short, this chapter will move from philosophy to craft; from the panoramic to the microscopic.
The philosophy behind writing well can be expressed in three simple words: “Less is more.” I call this the Zen koan of good writing. A Zen koan is a simple Buddhist riddle that, on first blush, makes no sense. Consider this classic Koan: “Imagine the sound of one hand clapping.” Nonsensical, right?
Yet, if you ever were able to imagine the sound of one hand clapping, congratulations. According to Buddhist tradition, you'll be heaven bound. No more earthly reincarnations for you, struggling like the rest of us to reach enlightenment.
Thankfully, "Less is more" isn't so tricky a koan to decipher. Nearly anyone can crack it with hard practice. On the downside, though, deciphering "Less is more" won't lead to heavenly nirvana. But I can promise with some assurance that understanding the meaning of it will lead to mastery of the secrets of writing well.
Modern writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, is about the art of brevity. Writers try to say as much as they can in as few words as possible. The best of their work is simple but not simplistic. They make less become more.
Terse writing is as American as video games and rocketry. The Japanese invented the first and Nazi engineers the second, but we've long since made them both an integral part of American culture.
Ditto with brevity in writing. It was introduced by ancient Athenian poets such as Pindar, who favored a sparse, literal, fact-driven style. Scholars say this Greek sensibility in words first came to America with the Puritan settlers in the 1600s. They considered it sinful to use adjectives, deeming them showy and pretentious.
Puritan Plain, as scholars call it, has gone in and out of style throughout American history. James Wilson, among the first justices to sit on the Supreme Court, believed all court decisions should be written in clear, straightforward language, shorn of all legal and technical jargon. That way any American could understand them.
By the 1800s, Puritan and Wilson's ideas about clear and compelling language had gone out of fashion. At that time, much newspaper and magazine writing was as florid as a flowering lilac. Here below is a representative example from the front page of the New York World in 1896. At the time, the World was the country’s largest and most influential newspaper. It had sent star correspondent James Creelman to cover growing Cuban resistance to Spanish rule. Of the Spanish response to the rebels, Creelman wrote:
“The horrors of barbarous struggle for the extermination of the native population are witnessed in all parts of the country. Blood on the roadsides, blood in the fields, blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood! The old, the young, the weak, the crippled, all are butchered without mercy.”
As Creelman and his ilk were drenching readers in blood, some American editors were crying foul. One of the loudest voices of protest came from William Cullen Bryant, the longtime editor of the influential highbrow newspaper, the New York Evening Post. Bryant was a curious figure, having been a poet who came to journalism in the mid-1800s. He drew his inspiration from the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who strived to capture the beauty of the natural world in prose anyone could understand and appreciate. In that spirit, Bryant counseled his writers to favor the speech of ordinary Americans. They were to use “begin,” not “commence”; “fire,” not “devouring element.” Yes, respectable people really wrote like that back in the early 1800s.
Still, for most of his life, Bryant was often a voice in the wilderness. It wasn’t until the 1920s that a new generation of writers arose to challenge the florid convention. Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, to name but a few, wrote newspaper stories, magazine articles and novels in short simple sentences in the active voice. Strong verbs drove sentences. I suspect Bryant was rejoicing in his grave.
In books such as Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,” Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” and Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” there were no long inner monologues nor long character descriptions; neither were there long authorial asides nor moral preaching. Characters revealed their personality and inner thoughts through how they dressed, where they lived, what they ate, drank, and smoked and by whom they canoodled (Go look it up. You won’t be disappointed).
Consider this passage from Chandler's novel the “Long Goodbye,” in which private detective Philip Marlowe gives his no nonsense assessment of the newspapers of his day:
“Newspapers are owned by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there’s competition - hard tough competition for circulation, for news beats, for exclusive stories. Just as long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners. If it does, down comes the lid.”
No blood and guts here. Chandler describes newspapers in simple sentences, squeezed dry of passion, coolly rendered.
As works such as “The Long Goodbye” gained commercial success, they influenced the writing in newspapers and magazines, which began to mimic the spartan techniques of Hemingway and Chandler. The art of brevity took hold and it remains the model of excellence to this day.
Here’s how it works in practice: Writers harness strong verbs to drive simple sentences in the active voice that express one clear thought. Now, let’s examine each aspect of this practice.
It begins with a relentless quest for brevity. Skilled writers struggle to squeeze out any words that either muddle clarity or slacken the pace of their writing. They strive for sentences that are simple and direct. Not that every sentence need read like “See Dick run.” A skilled writer can craft a 100-word sentence that runs as smoothly as a mountain brook and is just as clear.
But it takes a lifetime to learn how to adeptly handle a long sentence. It’s best at first to write simple sentences that you can control effectively. Add complexity only as your ability to handle it grows. Never sacrifice clarity for length or showmanship. As Confucius said nearly 3,000 years ago, “In writing, clarity is everything.”
The first step toward clarity is limiting a sentence to one complete thought. If a sentence opens with an explanation about why Red Delicious apples are so red, then it shouldn’t digress midway to rant about the artificial coloring of oranges. Below are two short examples, the first from the Economist and the second from the Wall Street Journal:
“There is no exaggerating China’s hunger for commodities.”
“The portly Mr. Slim is a study in contradiction.”
Both are superb sentences in every way, which we will discuss later, but first notice how each expresses one - and only one - compelling thought.
It’s fine to add modifying clauses, but only to deepen understanding of the sentence’s idea, not distract from it. A skilled writer resists the urge to let a sentence meander off into a warren of non sequiturs and parenthetical thoughts. Such writing produces an incomprehensible hairball of unfinished ideas. You saw how such sentences read in the scholarly example in The Tao of Writing Poorly.
Also, beware of the dilutive power of too many prepositions or prepositional phrases.
A prepo what?
I know that many of you can’t tell a preposition from a participle. This isn’t a book of grammar but a writer needs to know the name and function of his basic tools. A woodsman may not understand how a chainsaw works, but he knows its name and how and when to use it. Likewise with writers when it comes to grammar and syntax. A woodsman wouldn’t try to cut down a tree with a jigsaw and a writer shouldn’t force a preposition to do the work of a verb. Yet that occurs all the time in my college writing classes. No, “with” is not a verb. It’s a preposition.
Prepositions are little words such as “with, to, after, behind, ahead” that do a lot. They connect nouns and verbs to a string of descriptive words. That’s essential to understanding writing well, but prepositions can be troublesome in the hands of inexperienced writers. The problem is they tend to proliferate liked rabbits, gumming up the works, confusing meaning and slowing pace to a meandering amble. Save ambling for a Sunday walk in the park. It’s no good for writing, unless that’s the effect you’re going for.
Here’s an illustrative example of the dilutive power of too many prepositions:
“A major power outage at Stony Brook University on Wednesday morning at 1:20 a.m. in the center of campus prompted hundreds students to march in protest.”
Readers have to wade through four prepositional phrases strung together in a row before they reach the action of the sentence. See how that slows the pacing of the sentence and makes it tedious to read? The sentence would read much better if the subject, “a major power outage,” were more directly linked to its action. Consider this rewrite, which removes most of the prepositions:
“Stony Brook University suffered a major power outage early Wednesday morning that prompted hundreds of students to march in protest.”
The best way to shear your writing of unnecessary prepositions is to write in the active voice. It employs an easy-to-follow logical construction that not only squeezes out unnecessary words but gives writing a sense of movement. That movement helps draw readers through a story.
The construction of the active voice is simple: A subject acts upon something or someone. Verbs transmit action from subject to object. In grammatical terms, a noun is followed by a verb, which is followed by a direct object. Don’t worry about remembering these terms. What counts is that you grasp the concept.
Here’s a simple but effective example: “Dick sees Jane.” Dick is the subject who does something to Jane, he sees her.
The best way to understand the power of the active voice is to contrast it to its evil cousin, the passive voice. Think of the passive voice as a rambling professor who hasn’t thought through his lesson plan and is unsure of what he wants to say. Now there’s a riveting class - not.
To see the difference between these two voices, let’s put Dick and Jane to work again. Here’s the same sentence as above, but rewritten in the passive voice: “Jane was seen by Dick.”
Notice how the passive voice bloats this sentence with two unnecessary words, “seen” and “by.” Not only do these words add nothing to the meaning of the sentence. They slow down it’s pacing. All three elements that signify the passive voice are present in this sentence: the verb “to be,” a past participle (seen) and the preposition “by.” If a sentence is missing any one of these three elements than it is not in the passive voice. That means the sentence, “The second step is to write in the active voice,” is not in the passive voice, although it uses the verb “to be.” It’s missing a past participle and the preposition “by.”
At the heart of brevity are strong verbs. Harness them to pump life into your writing. A rich repertoire of descriptive verbs will not only make your work interesting to read. It will also propel your stories, adding a sense of momentum essential to drawing readers through them.
What, then, constitutes a strong verb? For one, when read, it should prompt a vivid, active picture in the reader’s imagination. Such action verbs abound in the English language, but the best of them are small words that say a lot. Such verbs include titter, bristle and wallow; festoon, pester and roil.
Little words that say a lot trim writing of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. Why write, “walk leisurely,” when “amble” says the same thing? Ditto for “talk incessantly” and “jabber; “look into deeply” and “probe.” Each of these little verbs acts as a scalpel to pare writing down to its essence.
Adjectives and adverbs do have their place in writing - but only when they add new information that drives understanding deeper. Never use them to repeat what has already been said or to add fluff or glitz. Adjectives and adverbs work best when used sparingly. Heaping them onto a sentences is like adding four spoons of sugar to a cup of tea. It becomes too sweet to enjoy.
Verbs such as festoon, pester and wallow represent another important principle of strong verbs: They sound like what they mean. Take “wallow,” for instance. Say it aloud and you can almost hear someone or something enjoying a good roll in some muck.
A vocabulary rich in interesting verbs, while invaluable, is not enough to write with brevity. You need to know how to use these verbs effectively. The key is to harness them as the engines that drives your writing. That means using the right verb at the right place at the right moment.
The best way to understand this concept is to examine one idea, but expressed in three different sentences. Which one of the sentences below do you think best expresses the idea, making the best use of a verb to squeeze out unnecessary words while remaining vivid?
- “Wallowing, the pig enjoyed the mud.”
- “The pig enjoyed a leisurely roll in the mud.”
- “The pig wallowed in the mud.”
I would argue the last sentence. To understand my choice, you’ll need to understand what’s weak in the first two examples. Let’s start with sentence one. It starts out with an interesting word, “wallowing,” but it’s not a verb. It’s a gerund, or a noun masquerading as a verb. Here “wallowing” means the act of enjoying a roll in the muck. That means the second half of sentence repeats what’s already been said in using the gerund “wallowing.” Hardly a model of brevity.
The second sentence is a bit better. It’s written in the active voice, but “enjoyed” isn’t the most interesting verb. Nor does this verb paint a picture of action. And, once again, this second sentence is wordy. “Wallow” could stand in for “enjoyed a leisurely roll….”
Let’s look at the third sentence. It’s written in the active voice and uses a small yet interesting verb that says a lot. “Wallow” gives this sentence a sense of movement, serving as the coachman that drives it forward. It’s positioned in the right place at the right moment.
Now our wallowing pig embodies the art of brevity.
Copyright© 2006 by Nec Aspera Terrent
All rights reserved.
Barking Dogwood Press, Atlanta, GA
