In my first 3 years of writing, I wrote over 1,000,000 words — thank god that was all of them. Who knows how much more redundant verbiage might have flown from my fingers if it weren’t for William Zinsser’s three-word lifesaver:
Bracket unnecessary words.
This is the single greatest piece of writing advice I’ve ever received. Here’s how Zinsser explains it in On Writing Well:
Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the authors voice.
My reason for bracketing the students’ superfluous words, instead of crossing them out, was to avoid violating their sacred prose. I wanted to leave the sentence intact for them to analyze. I was saying, “I may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the meaning won’t be affected. But you decide. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works.”
In the early weeks of the term I handed back papers that were festooned with brackets. Entire paragraphs were bracketed. But soon the students learned to put mental brackets around their own clutter, and by the end of the term their papers were almost clean.
Today many of those students are professional writers, and they tell me, “I still see your brackets — they’re following me through life.”
I first practiced Zinsser’s advice by printing a blog post and editing it by hand. I put parentheses around every word or phrase that seemed like it could be removed, and then I read it out loud. Lo and behold, the resulting text was clearer, stronger, and, best of all, shorter!
A corollary of this advice is that whenever you feel tempted to use parentheses, what you’re about to put inside them is probably unnecessary. Chances are, you can either ditch the phrase or, if it’s actually important, ditch the parentheses!
“The training is (obnoxiously) hard.” No. The training is hard or it’s obnoxiously hard. You must decide. How hard is it? This is your job as a writer. It is your duty to decide what’s important enough to be on the page. Usually, using parentheses is a cop out. It’s a hack to avoid doing your job.
Luckily, you can do this job not just while writing but also while editing your work after the fact. Give Zinsser’s bracketing tip a try. You’ll be surprised at how many words you don’t need:
- You don’t have to free (up some) time. You can just make time.
- You celebrate (happily) anyways. Just celebrate.
- An (old) castle is just a castle. Last I heard, there weren’t any new ones.
- Saying your friend is (kind of) nice kind of weakens your sentence. In this case, it also makes you sound (kind of) like a dick.
- “Apparently” doesn’t mean anything (apparently).
With every passing year, my writing becomes more concise — and yet, I keep finding 30% of my first draft can be eliminated.
Thanks to William Zinsser, I edit my work much more than I used to, and I wish I had more time to edit still.
In writing as in life, simplicity is sophistication. Bracket unnecessary words.