Tag Archive for: brevity

Writing tight with Trish Hall

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Brevity is a virtue. Tight writing is reader-friendly.

In Writing to Persuade, Trish Hall, a former editor of The New York Times op-ed page writes:

Tight doesn’t mean dull. It means consciously choosing your words and your sentence structure. Go back over the words until you are certain the reader doesn’t have to make undue effort to read, but can sink into the sentences like a bath. No friction.

Look at Hall’s quote above. It’s tight, but it’s not dull. Her original image of “sink into the sentence like a bath” grabbed my attention. I keep turning it over in my head.

 

Disclosure:  If you click on an Amazon link in this post and then buy something, I will receive a small commission. I provide links to books only when I believe they have value for my readers.

No brevity without substance, please

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“Brevity without substance is useless.” This statement in Bryan Garner’s HBR Guide to Better Business Writing spoke to me. Bryan Garner: HBR Guide to Better Business Writing

 

If you regularly read this blog, you know I’m a big fan of writing concisely, and observing the rule of 42-14-2. However, sometimes a longer sentence is easier to understand than a shorter sentence. And, a paragraph may be easier to understand than a single sentence.

Garner sums up your goal as follows; “Provide only the information the reader needs to understand the issue—no more and no less.”

 

Disclosure: If you click on the Amazon link in this post and then buy something, I will receive a small commission. I link only to books in which I find some value for my blog’s readers.

 

The image in the upper left is courtesy of Nick Youngson  [CC BY-SA 3.0]