| title | On the Discipline of Saying Less | |||||||||||||||
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| author | J. Wren Harrow | |||||||||||||||
| template | essay | |||||||||||||||
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The longer a sentence runs, the more it must justify itself. This is not a rule of taste so much as a rule of attention: a reader's gaze is finite, and every clause that fails to earn its presence borrows from the next one's budget. Brevity is therefore less a stylistic preference than an act of fiscal honesty — a writer who insists on length must, sooner or later, pay for it.
Critics have framed this case for a long time. Aristotle warned against speeches that "weary the hearer" [@aristotle-poetics], and Orwell, two and a half millennia later, called for the deletion of "every word that can be cut" [@orwell1946]. The principle outlasts its eras because it concerns a constraint of mind rather than a fashion of prose.
Brevity, as used here, is not the same as shortness. A short sentence can be bloated; a long sentence can be lean. The relevant quantity is the ratio of information to syllables. Strunk and White, in a book that is itself an example of the discipline it preaches, gave the matter the cleanest formulation: "Omit needless words" [@strunk-white].
The phrase is famously self-demonstrating. Three words; one instruction; no qualifications. A writer who internalises this sentence has already done most of the work the rest of the book proposes.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
The metaphor is mechanical, and the choice matters: a machine with extra parts is not merely uglier but less reliable. Prose, the analogy implies, has the same property. Each unjustified word is a small risk of failure.
A practical writer needs more than aphorism. Here are three tests, applied at the level of the sentence, that approximate the discipline:
- The strike test. Read the sentence aloud, then strike each word in turn and re-read. If the sentence survives the loss, the word was not earning its place.
- The reorder test. Swap two adjacent clauses. If the meaning is unchanged, the clauses were not arguing with each other; one is probably redundant.
- The replace test. Replace any abstract noun with a concrete one. If the sentence becomes clearer, the abstraction was a placeholder, not a thought.
None of these is infallible, but the three together catch most of the slack in ordinary prose. They cost a writer nothing but minutes, and they pay in clarity that no amount of revision-by-mood can reproduce.
It bears repeating that brevity is not an aesthetic of austerity1. The writer who composes a paragraph by counting words rather than weighing them produces something stunted, not something taut. Hemingway is often cited as the patron saint of compression, but his sentences, read closely, are full of small luxuries — a rhythm here, a colour there. What they avoid is unearned expansion: the second adjective when the first will do, the qualifier that doubles back to soften an honest claim.
The case for brevity is not that short prose is better than long prose. It is that prose which earns its length is better than prose which assumes the reader's patience. The difference is moral as much as it is stylistic: a writer who pays for their words respects the reader who reads them.
Footnotes
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The Spartan writers of the early twentieth century deserve better than they have received. A discipline practised without joy is not a discipline; it is a fear of being caught. ↩