how to use words
Is wordiness inherently bad? It’s bad if you want to say something in the fewest possible words to avoid wasting a reader’s time, or to avoid losing their trust, or to avoid annoying them. It’s bad if it
trips up or confuses themhow to revise a sentence #3
I want to make the following sentence more fluid by removing its commas, but they are preventing ambiguity:
Vague memories, without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing, bubbled into my conscious mind.
Without the second comma, the reader could initially read bubbled as a continuation of I was witnessing, before realizing that bubbled is actually a continuation of Vague memories. (Upon reflection, I realize this ambiguity is at least in part a symptom of the distance between the main subject and its verb.) Even mild confusion forces the reader to withdraw attention from the text and mentally iron out the wrinkle before they can continue reading. They might even have to re-read the sentence to straighten it out.
This, in my opinion, is unforgivable in good writing. Writers must work hard to remove all practical obstacles preventing a smooth reading experience, and only rarely subject the reader to this sort of interruption. To resolve this particular instance, I could restructure the sentence to connect Vague memories with its verb bubbled. The default, easy option is this:
Vague memories bubbled into my conscious mind without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing.
But I prefer this one:
Into my awareness bubbled vague memories without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing.
It enlivens the bubbling image by giving it more motion, which serves the spontaneity that the sentence is trying to convey. Also, it makes the content more fun to read by contributing variety of sentence structure to its containing passage:
The ongoing match had a dreamlike quality. Into my awareness bubbled vague memories without obvious relevance to what I was witnessing. Times I’d played soccer before, hazy but unignorable recollections of past situations on the field.
There’s also an opportunity to make the sentence more precise by using with no instead of without any:
Into my awareness bubbled vague memories
without anywith no obvious relevance to what I was witnessing.
I think it is more natural to read with no as relating to memories. In contrast, without can sound like I’m going to say without warning or something else describing the phenomenon of memories appearing rather than the memories themselves. We could also use of no, but it also adds a new split second of ambiguity when placed next to vague memories since it sounds like I’m going to say memories of some past event. Also an option is that had no, but it’s clunky.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as overthinking, but precision requires finetuning. A major task of writing is tweaking in response to what we anticipate the reader will experience. We do this based on our intuition as readers ourselves, not on measurements and objective criteria. That’s what makes writing art as opposed to science. (Though I think a scientific, databased approach to writing could be both revolutionary and scandalous.) We readers involuntarily predict what word will come next, so we writers must anticipate their anticipations.
There is at least one writing principle to take from all this: manage ambiguity in your writing so that the intended meaning is obvious to the reader. This sounds like a platitude, but it requires discipline that much writing doesn’t keep. Specifically, a writer should strive to make a reader’s first interpretation of a sentence easy to make, correct, and hard to doubt. A reader will disengage with your work if they lose too much faith in your competence as a writer.
Verlyn Klinkenborg’s
Several Short Sentences About Writinghas a great section discussing Some Practical Problems in sentences written by “excellent college students who went on to be very good writers.” He explains why he doesn’t give his students the benefit of the doubt regarding discrepancies and imprecisions:
[You] can only judge [a writer’s] intentionality in context. If all the sentences in a piece are clear and sharp, then perhaps—perhaps!—we can say that a slightly aberrant sentence is intentional, if there seems to be a reason for it. But if many of the sentences in a piece are unclear, ambiguous, or weak, we have to assume that intention is irrelevant— indiscernible at best. We have to assume the writer lacks control.
And who wants to follow someone who doesn’t seem to know the way?
. Avoiding wordiness can also be an aesthetic choice, like when you want to heighten the mental sensation of each individual word. In general, wordiness is bad if it causes a defect or undermines an effect you’re trying to produce.
But is wordiness itself a sin? Or is it useful sometimes? What about the rhythm that the “extra” words create? More generally, what about the sounds they create in a reader’s head?
Words are more than written symbols, they are things with their own unique shape and feel. From the memorable cover letter Robert Pirosh submitted for a copywriting job:
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory…I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty.
But words don’t exist alone. They are forever enmeshed with other words. They appear in context of one another, borrowing and lending meaning. Parallelism for example is a technique where words accumulate to create an effect together that their individual meanings cannot. From Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech:
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
Who would accuse MLK of wordiness? Imagine pulling him aside before he stepped up to the podium to suggest he drop the eight “extra” repetitions of let freedom ring.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, the mighty mountains of New York, the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado, the curvaceous slopes of California, Stone Mountain of Georgia, Lookout Mountain of Tennessee, every hill and molehill of Mississippi, and from every mountainside.
Great, we’ve cut out the “redundancy” and the poetry along with it.