Concision

Concision is intimately connected to clarity. Certainly there are some writers, masters of periphrasis, who can take the long way home without getting lost, but as a practical matter the Nuts and Bolts style—action-oriented subject-verb constructions that match syntax with logic—tends to make you a more concise writer.

　　But concision remains a struggle for every writer. Writing being the in-process, on-the-fly activity it is, essays come into being with a great deal of stress and mess. As our ideas swirl around us, and as we struggle to give them order, clarity, and vigor, our words swirl around us, too. It's typical for good writers to produce wordy early drafts, and then work through several stages of revision to find and eliminate all the flab. Richard Lanham, one of my favorite writing gurus, says that writing typically starts out with a high "lard factor," as he calls it—the number of words in one's first draft divided by the number of words in one's revision. As a rule of thumb, Lanham says, "think of a lard factor of one-third to one-half as normal and don't stop revising until you've removed it." Mark Twain's flippant comment also suggests that it's not too hard to get words down on paper; the difficulty lies in keeping the right ones.