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Should Your Writing Be Concise, Clear, or Artful?
Jesse Hines, freelance writer and author of Robust Writing, once wrote a post entitled “The Key to Writing Concisely.” His post consists of two sentences:
“Only write what is absolutely necessary to make your point. Not a word more.”
Jesse has an excellent point. Numerous words can be chopped from most writing while still preserving the point, and making it even more engaging.
However, elevating conciseness as the primary element of good writing can lead to bigger issues than the principle of conciseness is designed to eliminate. Specifically, there are two dangers to be aware of: 1) interpreting conciseness solely as brevity, and 2) neglecting art and style.
Danger #1: Interpreting Conciseness as Brevity
Brevity is an element of conciseness, but the two are not necessarily synonymous when applied to writing. Simply eliminating words for its own sake may or may not accomplish your goal.
Your goal is to change minds, elevate consciousness, arouse emotion, and/or move to action. In a word, impact is the goal. Impact is achieved by much more than plain conciseness.
Conciseness is the fusion of brevity and clarity. If striking words results in decreased clarity, conciseness suffers. If adding words does not increase clarity, conciseness is lost.
The urgency of conciseness has been accompanied by a rise in shallow thinking and terse, cold expression. This results in the loss of reader engagement, which brings us to our second danger of making conciseness one’s overriding goal.
Neglecting Art & Style
Conciseness is the bottom-line business element of writing. Art is the emotional element. Conciseness is male; art is female.
The art of writing consists of poetry and prose, music and rhythm, superfluities of language that make it sing and dance. Melodious profuseness is often a casualty of the Information Age. Yes, The Federalist Papers and War and Peace and Shakespeare’s plays could have been written more “concisely” — they could have been stripped naked, leaving an insipid shell in their place.
Yes, you can “get the point” through Cliff Notes — the superficial point, that is, as you scream past the profound depth of thought and emotion, the subtle nuances of history and human nature in your stripped down dragster of Information Age “conciseness.”
It’s true that readers get bored with meandering treatises congested with extraneous words. It’s also true that they also get bored with stripped-down, bullet-point, bottom-line, straight-to-the-point reports.
What’s the point? The point is that the best writing — even in the Information Age — is both poetic and effective, concise and deep. Conciseness pierces the mind; art opens the mind and melts the heart.
It’s simply a joyful experience to romp with words that rollick in the playground of the mouth — even if they’re unnecessary for the pure purpose of conciseness.
In other words, some words are “necessary” for reasons other than conciseness. Conciseness can take on an objective meaning. The words and phrases I speak of are creative — in other words, subjective — in nature. Conciseness can make your point, but art enables your readers to embrace your point.
Conciseness isn’t the only, or the primary, standard of good writing. It’s certainly one important element, but there are other critical elements, such as rhythm and rhyme, unique flavor, natural style, active voice, and concrete language.
Conciseness, clarity, and artfulness are all necessary elements of transformational writing. Elevating any one of them at the expense of the others lessens your impact. The three working in harmony form a Trinity that transport your audience to reading heaven.
So what’s the appropriate answer to the question posed in the title of this article? One word: yes.
P.S.
Here are a few of my favorite writers who exemplify my point:
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Stephen Palmer is a marketing consultant and persuasive writer with KGaps Consulting, a co-founder of The Center for Social Leadership, and the New York Times best-selling co-author of Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity.
He is a liberal-arts graduate of George Wythe University and a graduate of the “non-traditional business school” Wizard Academy.
Stephen resides in Round Rock, Texas with his gorgeous wife Karina, awesome son Alex, and princess daughters Libby, Avery, and Laela. Stephen and Karina blog about their magical life on Palmer Journeys.
Connect With Stephen:
Email: spalmer [at] kgaps [dot] com
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