“For sale.Baby shoes.Never worn.” -Ernest Hemingway King Philip of Macedon to King Agis III of Sparta: “You better surrender now, for if I conquer your land, I will burn your cities, destroy your temples, kill all the men, and enslave all women and children.” King Agis III of Sparta to King Philip of Macedon: “If” 5th-grade homework assignment: “Describe what laziness looks like.” 5th grade student returning a blank page with 2 words on top: “Like this” Do we write to please our own eyes, or to affect other people?
I don't get the connection between between brevity and the question. And the examples were clearly about brevity, but how does that relate to the question? What am I missing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase Looks like Philip made brief work of them. Yeah, there's a time and place for brevity and there's a time where it breeds ambiguity. Something can be verbose out of a desire for completeness or to simply run down the clock. I think a lot of people can detect padding. Others dismiss thoroughness or careful pacing as a sleep aid. There are different tolerances and expectations.
A writer can be concise and still convey many thoughts and feelings. Adding words does not always add to the depth of the narrative. Too many words, and it might stray into purple prose.
I don't think the answer to writing a story is always to cut down on words and reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. I mean no one wants to sit around reading 6-word stories for a few hours. But something like a novel you can often get lost in for a few hours on some lazy day. Sorry, @Agile Wit. Your questions just aren't really making sense to me. I'm failing to see what you're actually trying to ask or talk about on this thread.
I always look to reduce words when writing. That's my most basic edit. It doesn't mean that less words are always better. There's a balance you need to strike. You look at what you've written and decide if it can be written more succinctly. If the shorter version carries the same meaning with less clutter, then it's superior. That's not always true though. There are plenty of stylistic reasons you'd want extra words. There are descriptive, sensory, rhythmic, proportional, emotional, (and other reasons) that would demand more words. Knowing the minimum is necessary, IMO, because you must determine if the extra words are a mistake, and you can't even spot the extra if you can't define what that minimum is. I think we were talking in a long-ago thread about lexical density (which had another name back then, I can't remember what it was). That's the proportion of words in your sentence that are charged with lexical content compared to words that are functional and only there to connect the sentence. A sentence with a higher lexical density says more with fewer words. You can still write stupid sentences with high lexical ratios, but increasing the ratio is usually an edit you want to make. Then there are the redundant phrases, pleonasms, hedge words, and other fluff. They're mistakes because they move away from the elegant base sentence for no real reason. You always want to crush those, unless they're a quirk of the voice. That's another reason I always look for the bare minimum, not because it's in all ways superior, but because it shows all the tagalongs in your sentence that shouldn't be there. I want to stress, I reduce sentences to make room for more words. It would be as if you ran a company and you went through and fired all the screwups and layabouts. Then you could hire new people to fill their spots, useful people who pull their own weight or bring you something new and meaningful. You might also look about, like how the smaller crew functions, and make that the new company. It depends. * Anyway, I kind of like the top-post examples because of their flippantness. Is that a word? It's as if they're indifferent in their reply because they carry absolute truth. So for me, there's an attitude in the brevity. I think I hear it in each of those 3 examples. ----------------------- * Edit: Someone's going to say, "Depends on what exactly?" It depends on the paragraph. That's what decides the feel of your sentences, how they align with each other. That's my theory du jour. Maybe there's something to it . . . we'll see if I believe the same next month, haha. I've been writing again and studying my edits and it seems that all of my edits revolve around shaping sentences so that they connect into a stronger paragraph. It's as if I hear the mistakes in the paragraph and correct them in the sentence.
The word for examples like these is Laconic from the second example since Laconia was a place in Sparta that kind of spare response should be used where it is appropriate to the character and the situation it has little to do with whether the writing is pleasing to others
Brevity affects tone and rhythm. I try to keep that in mind. Possible interpretations are: Sharp, impatient, quick, action oriented, final. Brevity is a tool for emphasis, not a rule for good writing, in my opinion. In addition, brevity doesn't appear equal to lexical density. Lexical density would be, well, dense. Sometimes, the absence of important words creates meaning - what is missing from a phrase; what must be filled in by the reader. So, brevity serves a slightly different function than increasing lexical content. A famous example I enjoyed comes from As I Lay Dying. One chapter simply reads, "My mother is a fish."
What is this brevity you speak of? Are you just making up words now? All my 90,ooo words take offense at this thread. ;o)
