‘Eliminate Every Superfluous Word’
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
" I think the following rules will cover most cases:
i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. "
Lovecraft for instance. And Robert Howard (author of Conan).
And, the granddaddy of all: Thomas Carlyle whose “French Revolution” is packed with metaphor, simile, superfluous words, and convoluted sentences... indeed, he made fun of the way he writes in “Sartur Resartus” in a hilarious fashion.
I think people tend to imagine Hemingway as spare prose and pithy sentences, and when they try to mimic their stereotype of him, they end up with dry prose and dead sentences. Real Hemingway had range, often wrote long, descriptive sentences. And here we find the devil:
The trick isn’t wringing your prose down to a clear, factual account. The trick is knowing in the first place what is “necessary” to convey the truth of whatever writing.
“What literally occurred” is only one possible angle on this, and focus on that is neither necessary nor sufficient to create artful prose. Depending on the piece you may focus on what occurred, the feeling and mood of it, the reader’s relationship to any of it, or the questions any of the above evokes—-if the question is “what might this prose be _for_, at its heart?” then the list of answers is endless. And so the answer to the question “which words are necessary?” is “any of them might be, depending on what you intend to convey and to whom.”
So yes, eliminate every superfluous word, fine. Also, apply only the necessary paint strokes to the canvas. This advice is not helpful for a beginner, it’s only useful to someone who has artistry to convey and enough craft to bear critique.
But nothing much happens until paragraph 5, by which time no one cares, because they want a novel, not a tour guide. ("And on our left we have the Unicorn Park of Alkkl'Blah. Built by the Morgon Autarchy to commemorate their triumph in the Zoonac Wars of the third century, its thousand foot crystal spires are legendary for...")
You can do a lot with a single telling detail. Instead of describing everything, describe one thing that sums up everything else. Leave the rest to the reader's imagination.
That criticism is pretty applicable to The Sun Also Rises. Two great sentences and a lot of setting description.
I definitely recognize what you're talking about, but my sense is that there are two core problems of poor writing, neither of which is helped at all by this advice:
1. Having something to say at all. This is the art of it, not the craft. If you have something resonant to communicate and you do it with living words, audiences suddenly become quite forgiving of sloppy craftsmanship. I won't dunk on any books in particular, but we can all think of books that are both wildly popular and objectively terrible.
I think the right advice to overcome this issue is "live a life. Keep your eyes open. Like really go for it, man." Maybe after the first, breathless draft is complete then say to this author: good, now try cutting half the words but keeping everything you intended.
2. Bad craftsmanship. Poorly constructed scenes, paragraphs, sentences.
I think the right advice here is "write. write. write. read. write more." The aphorism goes something like "everyone has a million terrible words inside them, and they must write them all out before any of the good ones emerge."
Claim: in the normal course of events, if an intelligent and earnest person is an avid writer and reader and student of the world, their million words will become progressively better until they are finally good. I believe my quantity over quality focus for students is borne out by the research across domains.
"Nobody likes exposition dumps or purple prose, brutally cut everything" not only isn't central to the goal of generating a bunch of words, but it may actually discourage people from producing the volume of work I think they'll need to become good. I say write purple, write a 200,000 word infodump. No one likes infodumps until some genius comes along with the first pure infodump novel that sells 5mm copies while everyone else complains, and then that's the publishing game for the next 10 years.
Just whatever you do, write.
Yes. Most bloggers. A full screen of infodump about themselves and what they were doing, then, perhaps, just perhaps, some content. Too often, just enough content to maximize clicks.
- Bad craftsmanship.
That's a teachable skill. Merely writing many words is not enough. Someone must criticize them. Back when journalism had copy editors, many writers learned their trade as newspaper reporters.
- Just whatever you do, write.
And if no one is reading it, please stop.
This is not advice I would personally give, because: (1) Not-writing mostly guarantees that one is not going to get better at it. (2) Current audience size isn't a reliable indicator of whether one "should" (if we're judging) be doing a thing, whether that thing is writing, podcasting, creating open source projects, etc.
Everyone has to get through "the gap" between one's taste and one's skills somehow. https://vimeo.com/85040589
I'm trying to say that I think the actually most effective advice, on average, for an "intelligent and earnest person [who] is an avid writer and reader and student of the world" is to write and don't stop. All the caveats you might be tempted to add are already covered in the people I'm talking to, they happen naturally. On average.
If the 'blogosphere' is functioning well, it shouldn't much matter if inexperienced bloggers are churning out poor quality posts, as the best ones should still rise to prominence just the same. The average quality of all blog posts doesn't much matter. The existence of high quality blog posts is what matters.
On a somewhat different note, I'd ask bloggers not to misrepresent their skill level. It might be good exercise for a student to write about a topic they're learning about, but it's frustrating to read a post written in an authoritative tone which turns out to be full of rookie misunderstandings.
It is as if James violates every maxim of how to write simply and clearly and succinctly, but ultimately his writing has aura of ambiguity which enriches it rather than diminishes it. He will go paragraphs and pages even, one has to mentally unwind a lot of it, like an intricate puzzle, to grasp the tiniest specks, bits of knowledge about the story, about the plot. And the thing is he doesn't do much description, all the details are abstracted but the seeming convoluted manner, and subtle hints deducted from indirection, it does create a captivating experience.
I don't see there a disagreement, it is "just" a question on how one is lead through the world:
- Are you lead by the experiences by the characters of the book, and you simply feel the depth of the world behind it, and you learn to understand it over time.
- Or do you have the narrator simply explain everything to you.
- Or does some protagonist takes over that role.
That seems a bit lazy to me, and not so appealing. Still, it can made for a good read, mind you. I definitely swallowed some of those books.
More seriously, in my experience (which includes some pretty boony boonies) the PBS stations are fairly easy to pick up with rabbit ears and a single scan.
It's all the repeaters does the trick, I'm sure.
There, removed an extra word
"Hemingway’s voice distilled itself with miraculous speed, a fusion of telegrammatic urgency and high modernist impersonality, with counterpoint learned from Bach and rhythms located profoundly in his own neurology"
etc.
I’m a native speaker and have read 3 Hemingway books.
> Post-modernism reacted to the modernists high ideals and empty promises. After all, it was their era (the modernists) that sparked the Great War which introduced the world to the new era industrialized warfare. Not once, but twice. Post-modernists arrived into this new Cold world that was left.
Eliminate!
Which — without context — could be misinterpreted, say as a certain biological function.
The goal is not brevity bragging rights, à la code golf: The goal is to serve the reader, and sometimes a few extra words, well-chosen and -placed, can help.
(Also: A few extra words can serve as cheap insurance against ambiguity, which can be critical in contract drafting.)
For instance which words are superfluous is context dependent. Also "eliminate every superfluous word" is good advice primarily in context of the question "how do I improve my writing", it's terrible advice for "how do I stop pooping so much".
easily the most profound three words I had ever encountered as an aspirational teenage writer, though it would be several decades before my understanding of "compression" developed sufficiently to fully recognize and appreciate the depth of that insight.
One wonders what Goldman would have thought of Claude Shannon.
As my grandfather used to say, chacun à son goût - to each his own.
"“I read that paragraph and I want to cry,” confesses a literary scholar in Hemingway."
What? That paragraph was horrible. First of all, after reading it two times, I still have no idea what the point was, other than: leaves, dust, troops. Second, he says the same thing three times.
"Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the trees." Ok.
"The trunks of the trees too were dusty" No shit. There's dust raised in the air high enough to get to the leaves. It's probably gonna be on the trunk.
"and the leaves fell early that year" Wait. Did they already fall? Or are they falling now? Or is this an omniscient narrator saying they will in the future?
"and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising" Yes, you told us in the last sentence.
"and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling" Oh, ok, so the leaves are falling now.
"and the soldiers marching" Yes, you told us in the last sentence, and previously in the current sentence.
The advice to eliminate superfluous words is not a recipe, it's a joke that is a variation on, if you want to be a good writer, only write the good stuff, or don't publish the bad stuff. Worshipping great writers won't make you a better writer any more than doing a cargo dance will get supplies dropped from the sky. If you want to write, have a story to tell, the rest is editing.
I don’t actually think this is reasonable or possible. Readers are fully aware that writers are distinct from other writers in their prose structure. This is colloquially known as “style”. Additionally, other writers can most certainly identify individual writers by their narrative choices based on the same notion of “style”. Hemingway had a style and that’s why so many people compare their prose to him!
Authors certainly have a voice, but it's because the whole story is told in it, and not because they interject to comment and give the reader direction using extra descriptions from a perspective that is outside the story. It would be like a director addressing the audience or an "applause" sign. When I read fiction, I read it to appreciate the effect of the author's craft, and not to listen to someone sounding things out and practising. Adverbs aren't forbidden, but I see them as cribs for re-editing because they are usually placeholders for unformed ideas.
And no, adverbs do not make sentences passive. This idea popped up in amateur writing forums recently and its driving me nuts. Passive tense involves using is, has, was as verbs in a sentence. No where in any official definition of passive tense does anyone claim adverbs create passive tense.
And the joke is, writing is about life, minus the boring parts.