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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +title: On the Discipline of Saying Less |
| 3 | +author: J. Wren Harrow |
| 4 | +template: essay |
| 5 | +references: |
| 6 | + - key: aristotle-poetics |
| 7 | + text: "Aristotle. *Poetics*, trans. S. H. Butcher. Macmillan, 1902." |
| 8 | + - key: orwell1946 |
| 9 | + text: "Orwell, G. 'Politics and the English Language.' *Horizon*, vol. 13, no. 76, 1946, pp. 252-265." |
| 10 | + - key: strunk-white |
| 11 | + text: "Strunk, W. and White, E. B. *The Elements of Style*, 4th ed., Allyn and Bacon, 2000." |
| 12 | +--- |
| 13 | + |
| 14 | +# The Argument |
| 15 | + |
| 16 | +The longer a sentence runs, the more it must justify itself. This is |
| 17 | +not a rule of taste so much as a rule of attention: a reader's gaze |
| 18 | +is finite, and every clause that fails to earn its presence borrows |
| 19 | +from the next one's budget. *Brevity* is therefore less a stylistic |
| 20 | +preference than an act of fiscal honesty — a writer who insists on |
| 21 | +length must, sooner or later, pay for it. |
| 22 | + |
| 23 | +Critics have framed this case for a long time. Aristotle warned |
| 24 | +against speeches that "weary the hearer" [@aristotle-poetics], and |
| 25 | +Orwell, two and a half millennia later, called for the deletion of |
| 26 | +"every word that can be cut" [@orwell1946]. The principle outlasts |
| 27 | +its eras because it concerns a constraint of mind rather than a |
| 28 | +fashion of prose. |
| 29 | + |
| 30 | +## A Working Definition |
| 31 | + |
| 32 | +Brevity, as used here, is not the same as shortness. A short sentence |
| 33 | +can be bloated; a long sentence can be lean. The relevant quantity is |
| 34 | +the ratio of information to syllables. Strunk and White, in a book |
| 35 | +that is itself an example of the discipline it preaches, gave the |
| 36 | +matter the cleanest formulation: "Omit needless words" [@strunk-white]. |
| 37 | + |
| 38 | +The phrase is famously self-demonstrating. Three words; one |
| 39 | +instruction; no qualifications. A writer who internalises this |
| 40 | +sentence has already done most of the work the rest of the book |
| 41 | +proposes. |
| 42 | + |
| 43 | +> Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no |
| 44 | +> unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the |
| 45 | +> same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a |
| 46 | +> machine no unnecessary parts. |
| 47 | +
|
| 48 | +The metaphor is mechanical, and the choice matters: a machine with |
| 49 | +extra parts is not merely uglier but less reliable. Prose, the |
| 50 | +analogy implies, has the same property. Each unjustified word is a |
| 51 | +small risk of failure. |
| 52 | + |
| 53 | +# Three Tests |
| 54 | + |
| 55 | +A practical writer needs more than aphorism. Here are three tests, |
| 56 | +applied at the level of the sentence, that approximate the |
| 57 | +discipline: |
| 58 | + |
| 59 | +1. **The strike test.** Read the sentence aloud, then strike each |
| 60 | + word in turn and re-read. If the sentence survives the loss, the |
| 61 | + word was not earning its place. |
| 62 | +2. **The reorder test.** Swap two adjacent clauses. If the meaning |
| 63 | + is unchanged, the clauses were not arguing with each other; one |
| 64 | + is probably redundant. |
| 65 | +3. **The replace test.** Replace any abstract noun with a concrete |
| 66 | + one. If the sentence becomes clearer, the abstraction was a |
| 67 | + placeholder, not a thought. |
| 68 | + |
| 69 | +None of these is infallible, but the three together catch most of |
| 70 | +the slack in ordinary prose. They cost a writer nothing but minutes, |
| 71 | +and they pay in clarity that no amount of revision-by-mood can |
| 72 | +reproduce. |
| 73 | + |
| 74 | +# What Brevity Is Not |
| 75 | + |
| 76 | +It bears repeating that brevity is not an aesthetic of austerity[^1]. |
| 77 | +The writer who composes a paragraph by counting words rather than |
| 78 | +weighing them produces something stunted, not something taut. Hemingway |
| 79 | +is often cited as the patron saint of compression, but his sentences, |
| 80 | +read closely, are full of small luxuries — a rhythm here, a colour |
| 81 | +there. What they avoid is *unearned* expansion: the second adjective |
| 82 | +when the first will do, the qualifier that doubles back to soften an |
| 83 | +honest claim. |
| 84 | + |
| 85 | +[^1]: The Spartan writers of the early twentieth century deserve |
| 86 | +better than they have received. A discipline practised without joy |
| 87 | +is not a discipline; it is a fear of being caught. |
| 88 | + |
| 89 | +# Conclusion |
| 90 | + |
| 91 | +The case for brevity is not that short prose is better than long |
| 92 | +prose. It is that prose which earns its length is better than prose |
| 93 | +which assumes the reader's patience. The difference is moral as much |
| 94 | +as it is stylistic: a writer who pays for their words respects the |
| 95 | +reader who reads them. |
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