Concision that is actually teachable

A paragraph of the kind that circulates in every organisation. It's 111 words.

It should be noted at the outset that, due to the fact that the previous system was not able to handle the volume of applications that we were receiving during the course of the busy summer period, a decision was taken by the management team in order to procure a replacement. In the event that the new system is not fully and completely operational by the end of September, there is a possibility that we may possibly need to revert back to the old one on a temporary basis for a short period of time. It is important to note that this would not be a desirable outcome for anyone concerned.

And here it is at 47 words, with nothing removed but words.

The old system could not handle the summer volume of applications, so the management team bought a replacement. If the new one is not fully working by the end of September, we may have to go back to the old one for a while. Nobody wants that.

Every fact survives. The old system, the volume, the summer, the management team, the replacement, September, the temporary reversion, and the fact that this would be unwelcome are all still there. Fifty-nine percent of the words are not.

Note "not fully working" rather than "not working". The original said "not fully and completely operational", and a system that isn't fully operational may still be partly operational, which is a different fact from one that isn't working at all. Fully and completely is a doubled pair and one of them goes; fully is not padding, and dropping it would have been a cut that changed what the sentence claims. That distinction is the whole discipline of this lesson.

What the famous advice actually says

Strunk's version of this, in The Elements of Style of 1918, is the most quoted piece of writing advice there is. It's also routinely quoted at a quarter of its length, and the quarter that gets quoted is the least useful part.

The whole of rule 13's first paragraph reads:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell."

The analogy is exactly right. A machine part that does nothing isn't neutral; it's weight, and something has to carry it. And the last sentence, which almost nobody quotes, is Strunk answering the misreading his own headline invites, sixty years before anyone accused him of it. He is not telling you to be brief. He is telling you to make every word tell.

Then there's the part that surprises people who only know the four words. Rule 13 doesn't stop at the principle. It gives you a list:

the question as to whether → whether

there is no doubt but that → no doubt

used for fuel purposes → used for fuel

he is a man who → he

in a hasty manner → hastily

owing to the fact that → since

in spite of the fact that → though

That is instruction, not a slogan, and two of this lesson's six kinds are sitting in it already.

So where's the objection? Geoffrey Pullum puts it this way in "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice":

"Many are useless, like 'Omit needless words.' (The students who know which words are needless don't need the instruction.)"

Read fairly, that lands on the headline and not on the rule. Four words on their own tell you what the finished state looks like and nothing about how to reach it, rather like telling someone to sculpt an elephant by removing everything that doesn't look like an elephant. Strunk knew that, which is why he wrote three more paragraphs and a substitution list. What happened over a century is that the headline travelled and the rule stayed behind.

Pullum is careful about this too, and the care usually gets dropped when he's quoted. In the same essay he calls the style advice "mostly harmless" and writes: "Even so, it doesn't hurt to lay such well-meant maxims before novice writers." His quarrel is with the book's grammatical claims, which lesson 8 takes up, not with the idea of telling a beginner to cut.

So this lesson isn't supplying what Strunk left out. It's doing what he did, at more length and with the kinds named, because a list you can hold in your head is what makes the cut repeatable.

The six kinds

Don't cut by feel. Name the kind of every cut, and you'll be able to do it again next week and on someone else's writing.

This list is mine. It was assembled from the sources at the foot of this lesson and from the pattern of the examples; Strunk's list is shorter, Williams's catalogue is longer. Use this one because six is few enough to remember at the moment you need it.

None of these is a rule about long words, and every cut above leaves the vocabulary alone.

Down the paragraph, cut by cut

The 111-word paragraph again, with every cut named. Before you look at the table, do its first sentence yourself: "It should be noted at the outset that, due to the fact that the previous system was not able to handle the volume of applications that we were receiving during the course of the busy summer period, a decision was taken by the management team in order to procure a replacement." Name each cut and its kind.

Work down the whole paragraph now and you'll see nothing left over that the six kinds and lesson 3 can't account for.

Notice the row that isn't one of the six. "A decision was taken in order to procure" is a buried action from lesson 3, and undoing it is a concision move as well as a clarity move. Count it as a seventh kind when you tally your own cuts, because it's the one that returns the most words for a single change. That overlap isn't a coincidence: an action buried in a noun always needs extra words to hold it up.

The wrinkle: some repetition is holding the passage together

This lesson couldn't have come any earlier, and here's why.

Take two sentences from lesson 5's bridge paragraph:

Replacing those beams would cost about two million pounds. That cost is far more than the four hundred thousand pounds left in this year's capital budget.

A concision pass will find "That cost is far more than" and see six words repeating something the reader was told half a second ago. Cutting looks obvious:

Replacing those beams would cost about two million pounds. Only four hundred thousand pounds is left in this year's capital budget.

Five words shorter, both figures intact, no fact lost. And the paragraph is worse, because the second sentence now opens on a fresh number instead of on something the reader already has. The chain from lesson 5 is broken, and the reader has to work out the relation between two million and four hundred thousand for themselves.

Repetition in the topic position is not padding. It is the join. It looks exactly like padding, which is why concision passes damage prose so often, and why "cut anything you've already said" is a dangerous rule for anyone who hasn't met the given and new contract.

So ask what the repeated words are doing. If they're carrying the reader from the previous sentence into this one, they're load-bearing. If they're just there, they're not.

What people get wrong

"Shorter is always better." A passage that's been cut below the point where it makes sense is shorter and useless. The target isn't fewer words; it's no words that fail to carry something. Strunk says this himself in the rule, which is the sentence nobody quotes: not that you make all your sentences short, "but that he make every word tell."

"Cut every adjective and adverb." This one isn't Strunk's. "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs" was added in the 1959 revision, and Pullum notes that the very next sentence of the book breaks it. This course hasn't read that revision and takes the wording from Pullum. Either way the advice is wrong: adjectives that carry information aren't padding. A twelve-page report and a report are different facts.

"Never repeat a word." This one causes real damage. It sends writers to a thesaurus to find a different word for the same thing, and now the reader has to work out whether the scheme in this sentence is the same as the programme in the last one. Use the same word for the same thing, every time. Lesson 9 comes back to it: in Nancy Sommers's study of student and experienced revisers, one student described his whole revision strategy as reaching for a thesaurus. It's a recognisable habit, though that was one writer in a study of fifteen, so take it as a thing to watch for in yourself rather than as a measured difference between novices and experts.

"Concision is about vocabulary." Nearly every cut in this lesson's table left the vocabulary untouched. Replacing utilise with use is worth doing and saves you two letters. Replacing there is a possibility that we may possibly need to with we may saves you nine words.

"I'll know padding when I see it." You won't, in your own writing, for the reason lesson 4 gave: you know what you meant, so every word looks necessary. Name the kind. If you can't name the kind, you're guessing.

Practice

Where this goes next

You have now finished the sentence and the paragraph. Everything so far has been about what happens inside a passage of prose.

The next lesson goes up a level, to the parts of a document that aren't prose at all: headings, lists and tables. Those are what a reader uses when they're not reading but looking, and lesson 1's figures are about exactly that reader, the one who takes in about a fifth of a page they haven't yet decided to commit to. It's the quarter of the subject that writing courses usually leave to designers.

Go deeper

• Strunk's rule 13 in full, which is two pages, and most of it is the substitution list. Reading the rule instead of the slogan is this lesson's first point, and it takes three minutes.
• Pullum's "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice", for the objection in its own context, including the concessions that usually get dropped when he's quoted.
• GOV.UK's word list, which is a working substitution table of the same kind as Strunk's, written a century later for people who have to get it right at scale.
• Joseph M. Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Part Four, whose catalogue of redundancy is longer than the six kinds here. This course has not read it.

Sources

• William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style (1918), rule 13. The first paragraph is quoted in full above, including the sentence, usually dropped, that the rule "requires not that the writer make all his sentences short... but that he make every word tell"; the substitution pairs quoted are Strunk's own, from the same rule. The 1918 text was read for this lesson.
• E. B. White's 1959 revision is not read by this course and nothing is cited to it. The "write with nouns and verbs" advice discussed in the misconceptions is quoted as Pullum reports it, and attributed to that revision rather than to Strunk. The string does not appear in the 1918 text.
• Geoffrey K. Pullum, "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice", The Chronicle of Higher Education (2009), for the objection that the four-word maxim is not usable instruction, and for the qualifications quoted with it: "mostly harmless" and "it doesn't hurt to lay such well-meant maxims before novice writers". His wider argument is lesson 8.
• Nancy Sommers, Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers (report to the National Institute of Education, 1982), for Michael, the student whose "strategy is to use a thesaurus". Eight freshman students and seven experienced adult writers. The lesson claims nothing about novices in general from it, because the study does not support that.
• Joseph M. Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, on concision. This course has read the book's structure and central principles as others report them, not the text itself, so the six kinds are this course's own list, assembled from the sources above and from the pattern of the examples. The lesson says so where the list is introduced.
• Every word count in this lesson was recounted from the passage printed beside it: 111 words to 47, which is 58 percent; the predict block's 32 words to 8; and the six-word repetition in the bridge pair.