Economy of Expression: When five words will do the work of sixteen, with no loss of vividness or clarity, please hack the extra eleven out of there. Economy does no mean brevity, but requires “that every word tell”. Compression of meaning is one of the factors that create impact in our writing, and its power is felt even by simple readers who cannot explain why they are moved. Sections A through D illustrate some common sources of wordiness that dilute our effectiveness. Squeeze the water out of what you write, even if only a word or two.
A. Stock or Prefabricated Phrasing: This often makes our writing windy and always makes it stale. Underline the familiar or stale combinations of words in the examples below – they’re not cliches in the sense of hackneyed metaphors or similes, but they have the same wearisome effect on the reader, and they make the statement diffuse, robbing it of impact:
1. Indifference on the part of Stevening to the fact that his films are full of vice make him a sorry influence as far as young people are concerned.
Nearly half of that sentence is stock phrasing (13 words out of 28), and the effect is like driving on ice – we try to pull away from the stop sign but we’re moving hardly at all, though the engine races and the tires whine – a lot of words are going by, but little information. “Indifference on the part of Stevening” should be reduced to “Stevening’s indifference.” And when we write in standard phrases we often cease to think about what the words mean 0 it’s not a fact that these films are ridden with vice, but only this author’s value judgment. The stock phrase “as far as… are concerned” is completed by adding X, Y, or Z in the blank – “as far as tennis is concerned,” or “as far as college was concerned.” Fill-in-the-blank writing is like painting by the numbers – it does not produce distinguished results. The sentence above should be pruned: “Stevening’s indifference to the vice in his films has a sorry influence on the young.” I’m not here concerned with the author’s meaning, but only his manner of expressing it. If wordiness may be compared to body fat, then strive for a lean and athletic style, through exercise.
2. With all due respect to Joseph Stalin, how anyone could want to have his own image adored on millions of posters, portraits, and monuments was beyond me. His ruthlessness and fear of conspiracies caused the deaths of millions of ordinary Russians. A case in point was his massacre of the Kulaks and his purge of the Red Army’s officer corps, which catastrophes that…
The opening phrase makes no sense, since the author does not “respect” Stalin – writers of hackneyed phrases become inattentive to the meaning of their words. After cutting the first five words, the author is left with a stock sentence beginning “How anyone could want… was beyond me,” and he plugs in A, B, or C to bung the hole. Finally, after noting Stalin’s paranoia and brutality, he wishes to cite specific instances, so he prefaces these with the stock phrase “A case in point was….” But the reader needs no help to recognize that the references to the destruction of the Kulaks and the Red Army purge are offered as evidence. Such phrases as “For example,” “By way of illustration,” and “A case in point” are nearly always deadwood (and he cites two cases, not one). We could improve the economy of the passage and freshen its stale smell by saying “How Stalin could endure the adoration of his image on millions of posters, portraits, and monuments is a mystery of human vanity. His ruthlessness and fear of conspiracies caused the deaths of millions of ordinary Russians, for the massacre of the Kulaks and his purge of the Red Army’s officer corps were catastrophes that….”
It’s easy to write in stock phrases, for the sentences almost write themselves, but as Hemingway said, “Easy writing makes hard reading.” We’re all guilty of this slovenliness to some degree, especially in speech when we’re constructing sentences rapidly, but let’s struggle against this vice. It may be quick and easy to fling together prefabricated mobile homes, but there’s no much pride of ownership in them. Some people seem unable to open their mouths without some dead phrases flopping out, and George Orwell sees this as evidence of staleness of ideas. The corruption of our political oratory is demonstrated by several of the presidents we’ve elected in the past half-century. Richard Nixon (R.) and Lyndon Johnson (D.) were painful to the ear, and I’d rather spend a hot summer in Purgatory than listen to ten words’ utterance by Bush the Second.
