All writers are either putter-inners, or the taker-outers.
We either write sparingly, and then add more in. Or, we over-write, and then edit down. (Count me as an over-writer). It helps to know who we are, so we can then focus on how to keep tight and clear prose.
That’s from the 2013 book How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by the journalist and journalism scholar Roy Peter Clark. Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Tom Wolfe’s “status details” refer to the symbolic everyday things—like clothes, manners, gestures, and possessions—that reveal a person’s social standing, desires, and position in America’s complex hierarchies, a core element of his “New Journalism” style used to portray characters’ realities and America’s obsession with prestige
- Intertextuality
- “Use simple words to build dramatic ideas”
- Author argues “no dumping” online — but I’m less sure that’s a sensible rule; great writing requires lots of it, and the internet allows that, so I’d argue it depends where and for whom
- Author souts out Jay Rosen for good short writing (including an example of Rosen writing we should keep “the press” distinctive from the wider world of “media”)
- Watch sentence word length in a paragraph that changes pace: medium, long, long, medium, short.
- Author in his previous book Writing Tools: writing in two for comparison divides the world in two; writing in threes encompasses the world with example
- RH Blyth: a haiku is “an open door that looks shut”
- Tom Stoppard : better to be quotable than to be honest
- Mark Twain on aphorisms: a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense
- New Criticism: it focused exclusively on close reading of the text itself, viewing literature as a self-contained object and rejecting external factors like author biography, historical context, or current events as relevant to a work’s meaning or value, emphasizing language, structure, and imagery within the “words on the page”. Key concepts included the autonomy of the text, the “intentional fallacy” (ignoring author’s intent), and the “affective fallacy” (ignoring the reader’s emotional response).
- Old English is hard, blunt vocabulary; Norman brought soft and urbane French
- Writers are either putter-inners, or the taker-outers
- Donald Murray: “brevity comes from selection and not compression” — or as author says rather than nickel and diming select words, look for $20 ideas or themes to pull out entirely
- Joseph Williams: five principles of concision
- Meaningless words (actually)
- Repeated meaning words (various and sundry)
- Words implied by others (terrible tragedy)
- Replace a phrase with a word (“in the event that” becomes “if”)
- Change negatives to affirmative (“not include” becomes “omit”)
- Oscar Wilde: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
- Author cites a MLK quote shortened too much on his stature in DC, two rules for using quotes of the dead: (1) “never be taken out of context” and (2) reveal the honored character in the proper light — or better light”
- Dave Barry: always put the funniest words last
- Finley Peter Dunne’s famous line, “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” came from a satirical context in his 1902 book, Observations by Mr. Dooley, where his character, the Irish bartender Mr. Dooley, actually listed many powerful things newspapers did, showing their immense sway, making the famous phrase a sarcastic observation on the press’s overreach, not a noble mission statement
- James Geary five laws of the aphorism: “ it must be brief. It must be personal. It must be definitive. It must be philosophical. It must have a twist.”
- Proverb, aphorism, saw, maxim, epigram, motto, adage, saying
- Christopher Johnson’s 2011 book Microstyle: “Names don’t just represent brands; they start brands. The ideas and feelings that a name evokes provide the scaffolding for a brand.”
- “It does no good for the poet or essayist to look down on the writer of advertising copy. All writers can learn from specialized practitioners of the craft, and ad writing requires a keen sense of audience and purpose. After all the purpose is the purchase.”
- Text exchanges are dialogue in succinct form
- “There is no more underdeveloped form of short writing than the photo caption and cut line”
- Life magazine example
- Robert Gunning’s 1994 book “How to Take the Fog Out of Business Writing“
- William Brohaugh’s 1993 book “Write Tight” book” calls “nonverbal streamlining,” recognizing lists, sidebars and other ways to display information so it can be easily consumed
- “Time is the co-author of good judgment”
- The 1982 book Headlines and Deadlines
- SEO can kill craft of SVO (subject verb object)
- Frank Luntz’s 2007 book Words that Work: “ it’s not what you say it’s what people hear”
- Jedidiah Purdy: “A marriage of commitment and knowledge produces dignified to work”
- Cole Campbell: journalism as democratic art: purpose, craft and use that made work “luminous”
- W.H. Auden: a poem is a contraption with someone hiding in it