Back in high school and college, our teachers often directed us to write papers of a specific length. “Give me 10 pages comparing and contrasting ‘The Three Musketeers’ to ‘The Three Stooges,’” an English teacher might have said.
Only now — in the midst of pandemic that requires office-survival skills — are we learning how wrong that training really was. Don’t fluff your stuff. Don’t fill 10 pages.
Instead, more than ever, write short.
Short is not the same as shallow. Writing short takes more care than writing long. You still must make your point; you just have to do it more efficiently. You may have to compose those 10 meandering pages — then hack, trim and compress them down to size. You learn to shorten while also dialing in on your message.
Professional writers all live with word limits. For this column, mine is 350. I usually write a draft that runs 600 to 700 words, replete with bloated arguments and clichés galore.
After that first draft, I start the whittling. I might ask myself: Did I really need the first two paragraphs of this piece, the whole excursion into high school English class?
Maybe I should have just started this way: First rule of writing during a pandemic: Keep it short.
After trying to cut out entire paragraphs, I’ll eventually get down to cutting words and phrases. Do I need both “hack” and “trim” in paragraph four? Do I need the “also” in the last sentence of the same paragraph?
And then I find myself here in the second to last paragraph, going on longer than expected.
Gradually, revising multiple times, I will continue to axe the excess prepositions, the distracting phrases, the torturous ramblings. I will write short, and be understood.
Neil Chethik, aka the Grammar Gourmet, is executive director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning (www.carnegiecenterlex.org) and author of “FatherLoss” and “VoiceMale.” The Carnegie Center offers writing classes and seminars for businesses and individuals. Contact Chethik at neil@carnegiecenterlex.org or 859-254-4175.