'Write concisely.' That phrase should be familiar. Chances are, your high school teacher or college English professor said that to you, and it is good advice. There are some serious benefits and advantages to concise writing. The three most common reasons why people should write more concisely are: writing concisely magnifies the power of your ideas, concisely-written text is … [Read more...]
Reduce Word Count, Increase Quality
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. - William Strunk, Jr., The more words you use in your writing, the more effort it will take to read. Good prose shows respect for readers’ time and brain cells by packing as much juicy … [Read more...]
Concise Writing
As I tell the authors whose books I edit, it’s relatively easy to write a whole book. You just do a mind dump. Then you hire me to help you clean it up. It’s that “cleaning it up” part that becomes a challenge. We tend to love our words, especially all those nifty adjectives and adverbs we find in the thesaurus and stuff into our sentences. But bloated sentences tend not to … [Read more...]