Concision - cutting the waffle

Many of us are time poor.

And so no one wants to spend time re-reading material to understand what it means.

If you make it difficult for your reader to read your work, chances are they won’t!

So making your message as clear as possible is critical; central to this is the concept of concision.

Some people naturally write with concision (some to the point where their words become staccato and hard to read - more on that another time) but most of us don’t. We have expressions and ways of writing that we use habitually and which are often based on colloquial or conversational style language that is generally “a bit waffly”. While this can be an important part of defining character and setting in fiction, it is rarely useful in academic, technical or report writing.

Another issue is that we’ve usually put a lot of time and energy into getting words onto the page and it can be hard to be ruthless and cut text.

Because of this natural attachment to our own work, structural edits and the cutting of large chunks (or whole sections) of text are best left to someone else. This is where a supportive friend, colleague or editor can really help.

But there is much you can do to improve ‘macro’ scale concision. Examples of saving words include:

“that result in …” → “give”

“are indicative of …” → “indicate”

“in the event of …” → “if”

“a number of” → “several”

“in addition to” → “and”

“is considered to be” → “is”

Have a look over your latest work using this type of concision ‘lens’ and see whether you can improve your writing by simplifying even just a few sentences.