Karen GoatKeeper's Blog - Posts Tagged "learning-to-write-concisely"
Concise Writing
School writing assignments are often given a length, a page, two pages, a paragraph. This is the opposite of concise writing.
The objective is length by any means possible. Add extra words. Add extra short sentences. Write bigger. Add more adjectives and adverbs.
The result of such writing is a mish mash burying the topic under muddy wordage.
Serious authors need to abandon this habit. Breaking habits is hard. The cost of not breaking this one is losing your readers and poor reviews.
Where does the writer start?
Pick a topic and write an essay about it. This can be a mere 500 words although a thousand is nice.
Read it carefully making notes of how many times words such as the, and, but, that appear. Delete these and read the piece again adding back only the ones needed to clarify the writing.
Now look at the word count. Calculate ten percent. Rewrite your piece reducing the original word count by that many words or more while retaining all of the original information.
When I began doing this, I had to cut my pieces from 1000 words to 500 words. This taught me to write concisely, but was really hard to do at first.
Now I am doing the exact opposite as I muddle my way through the draft of Mistaken Promises. It will get even worse in the next draft as elements from the series get included such as the learning to live in the country and cooking.
Ultimately I will return to the goal of writing concisely and ruthlessly edit the draft into a publishable book. Not just a publishable book as the sloppy versions can be published, but a readable book, one I would love to read and am proud to offer to others.
The objective is length by any means possible. Add extra words. Add extra short sentences. Write bigger. Add more adjectives and adverbs.
The result of such writing is a mish mash burying the topic under muddy wordage.
Serious authors need to abandon this habit. Breaking habits is hard. The cost of not breaking this one is losing your readers and poor reviews.
Where does the writer start?
Pick a topic and write an essay about it. This can be a mere 500 words although a thousand is nice.
Read it carefully making notes of how many times words such as the, and, but, that appear. Delete these and read the piece again adding back only the ones needed to clarify the writing.
Now look at the word count. Calculate ten percent. Rewrite your piece reducing the original word count by that many words or more while retaining all of the original information.
When I began doing this, I had to cut my pieces from 1000 words to 500 words. This taught me to write concisely, but was really hard to do at first.
Now I am doing the exact opposite as I muddle my way through the draft of Mistaken Promises. It will get even worse in the next draft as elements from the series get included such as the learning to live in the country and cooking.
Ultimately I will return to the goal of writing concisely and ruthlessly edit the draft into a publishable book. Not just a publishable book as the sloppy versions can be published, but a readable book, one I would love to read and am proud to offer to others.
