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WHENEVER
lecturing on good writing, I always start off by
advising plainness and brevity. Whether writing news or
feature, a letter or speech, the rule is to Keep It
Short and Simple. Experts go by the KISS Principle in
modern disciplines like software development, animation
and strategic planning. Thoreau, as far back as 1856,
pleaded, “Let us simplify, simplify, simplify.”
If we
don’t, this is how we’d rhyme:
“Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I
wonder what you are,
Up above
the world so high,
Like a
diamond in the sky.
Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific,
Vain
would I fathom thy nature specific;
Loftily
poised in the other capricious,
Strongly
resembling a gem carbonaceous.”
Spotting
clutter.
Every book on literary or technical writing has a
chapter on simplicity. William Zinsser, in On Writing
Well, tackles it by illustrating its opposite: “that
disease of writing” called clutter. “We are strangling
in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous
frills and meaningless jargon,” he cries. Daily they
befuddle. Take that business letter or inter-office
memo, for instance, the corporate report or the bank
notice explaining its latest “simplified” statement.
There’s the insurance or medical plan that even the
salesman can’t decipher. What about the “easy-assembly”
instructions of a child’s new toy, or “plug-and-use”
manual of the home appliance?
“Our
tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important,”
Zinsser rues. The airline pilot announces he is
presently anticipating experiencing considerable
precipitation, instead of just saying it may rain. The
sentence is too simple he thinks there must be something
wrong with it.
Cut the
fluff.
Zinsser wraps up: “The secret of good writing is to
strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every
word that serves no function, every long word that could
be a short word, every adverb that carries the same
meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive
construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is
doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants
that weaken the strength of a sentence.”
Antidote: cut the fluff. Thoreau practiced what he
preached. Complex ideas he reduced to simple words and
sentences. Open Walden to any page, and you will find a
man expressing himself in a plain and orderly way:
“I love
to be alone. I never found the companion that was so
companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more
lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in
our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone;
let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by
the miles of space that intervene between a man and his
fellows. The really diligent student in one of the
crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a
dervish in the desert.”
Brevity
a virtue.
If we
can’t be witty or erudite, at least we can be brief.
Only lawyers write documents over 10,000 words long and
call them briefs. Salvador Dali once opened a speech
thus: “I shall be so brief that I have already
finished.” By contrast, a friend of mine was so verbose
that, when he went to a wake, the corpse couldn’t stop
yawning.
How to
be brief? One way is by counting words. I was given an
800-word limit for this piece. That’d take 15 minutes to
read, on average. Reporters type “30” at the end of news
files to denote they’ve composed the maximum story
length of 30 paragraphs, to be printed into 30 newspaper
column-inches. That’d be about 800 words ,too. Speeches
should run about eight to 12 minutes, the average
listener’s attention span. Again, 800 words, max.
One
word’s fine. This speech opener had listeners sitting up
in anticipation. Feel free to use it—if you can stick to
800 words or less:
“When I
left home this morning, my wife advised me to be brief
when I got to the podium. ‘Remember,’ she told me, ‘that
the Lord’s Prayer has 71 words, the Gettysburg Address
has 272, and the Ten Commandments have 297.’ She also
reminded me that we have been married many years, and it
only took two words, ‘I do’, to get us to this point. I
shall indeed endeavor to be brief.”
Thomas
Jefferson advised: “The most valuable of talents is that
of never using two words when one will do.” Mark Twain
listened. In his time writers were paid by number of
words, and Twain commanded the handsome rate of 7¢ a
word. This he confided: “I never write metropolis for
seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I
never write policeman because I can get the same money
for cop.”
(Next
week: Examples, exercises in simplicity) |
