Writing Tip #59 - Be Concise
Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 03:10PM Everyone should want to be a better writer. And I’m not just talking to the fiction authors out there. Everyone. Whether it’s blog posts, Twitter messages, emails or Facebook messages, today’s virtual world is making your writing skills that much more public. And whether you want to believe it or not, you’re being judged on how well you write. So what’s one way to get better?
Be concise. Don’t use more words than you need to. Go easy on the adjectives. Kill the adverbs. Keep it simple.
And yes, I know to some people this seems like a totally foreign concept. After all, we were taught in school that we had to meet certain word or page counts. And how did we do this? We rambled, we blathered, we added words we didn’t need or whole sections. That produced bad habits that led have led far too many people to produce watered down, unconvincing writing.
A good rule of thumb: if a word sentence or paragraph isn’t directly contributing to the subject at hand, then it’s distracting from it. And that means it shouldn’t be there. Start cutting the fat and becoming more concise and you’ll find your writing to be stronger and clearer than ever.
Reader Comments (2)
Twitter often crunches my time (in a bad way), but it has helped me better understand the economy of words/characters.
Excellent point, Stacy. As frustrating as 140 character limits can be sometimes, it can definitely teach you to pack a message into just a handful of words.