Making every word count

Posted on 01. Feb, 2010 by Melanie in Writing

Every writing expert I’ve ever read agrees on one thing: if you want to write well, you have to eliminate every unnecessary word.

How closely you adhere to this rule will depend on the type of writing you’re doing. For example, taglines and slogans demand that you be as brief as possible. Blog posts are a little less exacting. And with this rule, as with others, I’ve noticed that technical and academic audiences are the most tolerant.

But just because your audience won’t complain doesn’t mean it’s good to be verbose. No matter what your setting is.

An example

Even trimming one or two words can have a huge impact on the force of your writing.

For a while, I had an obsession with someecards. If you’ve never seen them, someecards are pithy, usually hilarious (and sometimes raunchy) little morsels of humor.

The someecards.com site is clearly run by geniuses, because they give you, the visitor, a way to write your own cards. You can even select your own image and background color. When I discovered this, I was hooked.

One day, I had an idea for a card about reality television. Here’s what I came up with:

Not a work of genius, but I liked it. (I especially enjoyed the “house of cards” as visual metaphor for the precarious sanity of the folks roped into reality TV shows.)

But the more I thought about it, I realized this card was too wordy. If you browse through a few “official” someecards — the ones published by the site itself — you’ll see that they economize on words. Big time. That’s one reason they’re so hilarious.

So I reworked the card:

That’s MUCH better.

All I did was change “the stars of a reality show” to “reality TV stars,” but trimming 3 words from the joke gave it a lot more force.

Plus, the word “TV” is a little more specific than “show.” You can have lots of types of shows, but TV narrows down the medium, and “reality TV” narrows it even further. This specificity makes the line funnier.

Cutting copy like a crazy person

Am I a little, tiny bit OCD about words? Maybe. Do I love it? Yep. Does it make my writing better? Definitely.

If you want to write well — I mean really well* — this is how nuts you have to be. You have to be willing to lavish an hour of thought on one 14-word sentence, finally decide to reword it ever so slightly, and enjoy the process.

* I’m not saying I always meet this standard myself. But every rock star wordsmith I admire does.

Even dry technical documents?

“But,” you may wonder, “I don’t write ad copy or ecards. I write user guides/white papers/news articles. Does it really matter?”

Sure it does. Every unnecessary word you trim from your drafts saves your audience time. It spares them some boring detail they didn’t need. It adds force to your writing.

Maybe some of your readers won’t notice your efficiency with words. But many will. And that makes it worthwhile.