Write with Not Too Many Words

A friend recently told me she’d read somewhere that we should write “with conciseness,” meaning “with not too many words.” “I thought it was ‘concision,’” she said. I wasn’t sure which word was correct (turns out they both are), but immediately wondered, Who says stuff like that? Actually, I think I giggled a little bit because they both sounded like made-up words. You know how that happens sometimes—a real word strikes your ear or eye in some weird way and suddenly looks unreal, even comical?

I’m getting slightly off track now, but I once had a similar experience with the word “blue.” This was back in my landscaping days. One afternoon I was in the nursery dividing some hostas called Blue Something-or-Other. Each newly potted plant—all 100 or so of them—needed a newly written tag. I wrote “blue” over and over and over. Suddenly I looked at the tag I’d just written—the Sharpie ink was still wet—and my mind snapped. I could not remember how to spell “blue.” In a panic, I pawed through all the plastic tags, worried that I had just misspelled “blue” 100 times. I was looking for some sort of clue as to the correct spelling. There was no clue to be found. Then my mind snapped even more. Now “blue” didn’t even look like a word; it was just a nonsense syllable made up by some caveman as he gazed up into a cloudless azure sky (I could still spell “azure”).

My point (one of them) is that any word, no matter how familiar, can suddenly look or feel strange to you if it strikes a particularly soft part of your brain. My other point is that words like “conciseness” and “concision” will always sound weird to me because they’re not part of my style. “Concision” sounds like something that should only happen when you’re under general anesthesia. And “conciseness”—I know it’s in the dictionary, but to me it still sounds funny. I would just never write a sentence like, “One should write with conciseness.” Instead, I would say, “Write tight.” I might even say, “Shut up already.”

And now I’ll prove that I can follow my own advice.

Tags: conciseness, concision