How to Harness the Power of Brevity in Your Writing
Give me a KISS — keep it short and simple
Just Do It.
Beanz Meanz Heinz.
Make Believe.
Think Different.
Advertising and brand slogans — the ones that really stay with you — are models of succinct writing.
There are no extraneous words here, but then the words don’t mean the same on their own: they derive their meaning from the effectiveness of the campaign surrounding them, and the really top-notch ones eventually pass into the cultural lexicon.
Brevity (noun) — shortness of duration, especially shortness or conciseness of expression.
You’ll find a plea for brevity in many-storied writing guides. George Orwell’s third rule of writing (of the six rules outlined in his essay Politics and the English Language) is “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
While Stephen King, in On Writing, exhorts the writer to cut unnecessary words, revise long phrases, and generally get rid of anything that isn’t essential to the story. (You can find more detail about this in The Writing Cooperative’s excellent post on Stephen King’s…
