a brief case
Many writers have a fundamental flaw: we waffle.
Because what else would we do with a giant collection of lengthy and intricate (sometimes rare, archaic, and entirely obsolete) words, besides use them in literally everything? And if our heads are full of words, how else are we supposed to write other than unendingly — without a fullstop or line break in sight?
If my interest in a piece of writing dwindles at any point, the reason is almost always a long, paragraphish sentence in which I’ve had to sift through overlapping ideas, endless conjunctions, and phrases bumping around each other in an awkward shuffle to convey a point that could have been made with fewer words and zero waffling.
And just because we writers have expansive vocabularies doesn’t mean we need to pour every long word in our Really Cool Gallery of Elaborate Words into each piece we write. In fact, using the right words at the right time is truly the marker of a skilful writer. There’s a case to be made for brevity — because often, with conciseness comes clarity.
When writing anything, I always aim to write “the best words in the best order” — Samuel Coleridge’s definition of poetry. To me, that means choosing exactly the right words to paint a picture in my reader’s mind with artful precision. It is to write decisively, unambiguously, and sharply.
Practising conciseness in my writing (a lengthy process, ironically) began with writing for print newspapers as a journalism student. Being assigned tiny word counts for big stories means that brevity will find you by necessity.
For instance, penning play reviews for the drama department would have me needing to squeeze three-hour plays into two minutes of reading. How could I write about the acting, stage design, lighting, costumes, and script while weaving a few apt quotes from the director and actors in 350 words and still do all those aspects justice?
Playing this game of word-Tetris gave me no choice but to be strategic — first distilling content down to its bare bones, then weaving substance into the piece as I fleshed it out. First bones, then flesh — the perfect blueprint for brevity.
Learning that lesson early on has meant that refining my words comes easily to me. And now, I get a kick out of meticulously curating the very best words to make each point.
Readers’ attention spans are not what they once were, and concise writing has never been more important. We live in an attention economy — where, as social media gurus will tell you, you’ll lose your readers within the first three seconds of them encountering your content if you don’t have the right hook.
But embodying brevity isn’t just what’s best for your reader; it’s what’s best for your writing. Wouldn’t any writer like to think they write “the best words in the best order”?