THE MAGIC ART
The Best Writing Isn’t All About Cutting Words
How to add a little style and bounce to your prose
Ladies and gentlemen,
If you have ever dunked your head in writing advice, you are guaranteed to have surfaced with your ears wet with counsel to omit needless words, avoid wordiness, or prune your prose. The most famous of all is —
“Kill your darlings.”
— Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Art of Writing
I’ve been writing a series of articles on rhetorical devices The Magic Art — of Saying More with Less. So when I nestled into my chair to write about merism, I had to have a rethink. Merism is the rhetorical device that does the opposite, it says less with more.
So much writing advice is about eliminating the unnecessary. And it is valuable advice. It is a pleasure to read clear running prose that delights and surprises. There’s no fun in trying to pick out the pertinent points in the overly verbose. It becomes irritating. Yet, how much paring is too much?
Yes, please remove the bland and unremarkable but don’t forget to entertain. The reader is like you in her capacity for being bored by the benign. I’m sure you’ve had moments when your eyes glazed over and your thoughts wandered away from…
