Writing concisely

Choosing the right words

Use the simplest, most exact, most specific language your subject allows. The more specific, definite and concrete your words, the more likely you are to hold the reader’s attention.

• Use illustrative examples.
• Explain terms that could be misunderstood.
• Spell out abbreviations on first reference and do not invent them.
• Illustrate the magnitude of numbers with comparisons to familiar quantities.

Repeat a word if it is the best word. Repetition is a device necessary for continuity and clarity; it can hold the paragraph together. However, ban redundancy, which often comes in the form of an adjective that doubles a noun: vast majority, acute crisis, broad consensus, desired objective, period of time, mutual co-operation, urgent necessity, future prospects, estimated at about, introduced a new law, join together, exclusive monopoly, future forecast, false pretext.

Choose vivid, specific verbs over adverbs. Avoid noncommittal language.

Put statements in positive form. Use the word ‘not’ as a means of denial or in antithesis, never as a means of evasion. Negative constructions are often wordy and sometimes pretentious. In addition, they oblige readers to first imagine the positive alternative and then cancel it out.

Culling and pruning

Slash everything unnecessary to the main point.

Eliminate fluff and false starts such as I think, there was, it is.

Strip away prepositional phrases whenever you can use nouns and verbs instead. Abstractions and circumlocutions favour prepositional phrases.

Where possible, hack away weak intensifiers and qualifiers such as very, quite, rather, completely, definitely, so. To convey the nuances, use more specific qualifiers.

Where possible, replace empty adjectives such as appropriate, relevant, specific, suitable, serious, broad, effective, positive, meaningful, obvious, current with more concrete, specific qualifiers.

Reduce wordy uses of the verbs to be, to have and to make: whenever you can replace a form of the verb to be with a stronger verb, do so: are indications = indicates; are suggestive = suggests.

Trim extra verbs and verb phrases. Do not use several words when one verb will do.

Prune phrases such as: the fact of the matter, on this subject, in the context of, as it relates to, at the outset, in conclusion, finally, one might add that, it should be stressed/noted that, it goes without saying that, it is important to add that.

Simple grammatical structures and active voice

Texts sometimes get wordy when ideas are given more elaborate grammatical constructions than they need. Use strong nouns and verbs, then keep your structure simple. Wordiness and verbal evasion make the reader work too hard.

Choose the simplest tenses and moods: present, past, future.

Don’t bury long dependent clauses in mid-sentence. If a subject drifts too far from its predicate*, separated by endless intervening clauses, the reader may give up.

Watch for ‘which’: too many make for a bog of unnecessary words; ask yourself, ‘Can you get along without it? Can ‘that’ replace it?’

Use the active voice: it is shorter than passive structures, and it is more forceful and convincing. Passives are common in official and academic prose more by convention than for efficiency. It is often difficult to find the appropriate subject when a first person I or we is not appropriate, which leads to use of the passive.

Passives can be useful and should be kept if they clarify your meaning or:

• to defuse hostility – actives can sometimes be too direct and blunt;
• to avoid having to say who did the action, perhaps because the doer is irrelevant or obvious from the context;
• to focus attention on the receiver of the action by putting it first;
• to spread or evade responsibility omitting the doer, ‘regrettably, your file has been lost’;
• to help position old or known information at the start of a sentence or clause, and new information at the end.

* In English, the subject and the predicate are the two main constituents of a sentence. Simplified, the subject holds the noun and its modifiers while the predicate holds the verb and its modifiers.