Friday, January 13, 2012

Brevity

Blaise Bascal, the French polymath, is supposed to have once written, "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter."

This counterintuitive statement illustrates what most of us know from experience (and what Strunk and White teach in The Elements of Style): It's much harder to write fewer words than more.

Put another way, writing is really rewriting and editing (cutting). I certainly violate the "less is more" principle in this blog (and conversation) but cannot afford that luxury in my work—as I have learned the hard way: A book contract once called for 80,000 words and I turned in 104,000—and was asked to cut 24,000 words. (In my defense, it was a marketing issue: The manuscript I turned in would have been more expensive to print and would have raised the cost of the book, hurting sales. Welcome to book publishing!)

For several years, I have written a series of pieces for a client that have to be exactly 130 words in length. Sometimes I turn in 129, sometimes 131—but 130 is the target. By the end of today I will have written 1,164 of these pieces, or a total of (approximately) 151,320 words. (That's enough words for a nice two-volume set on the history of something. It also demonstrates that the impressive two-volume history of something you've longed to write can be done—130 words at a time.)

Writing to an exact word count has been a great teacher. With word-count functions available in word processing software today, writing for an exact word-count target is a greatly under-utilized teaching tool. If teachers would assign their students the daily task of writing "your number one goal for today in exactly 17/23/29/31 words"—or some similar, short exercise—they would go a long way toward teaching students how to write well; how to choose, substitute, eliminate, and prioritize their words.

Just a thought.

(Delete that last line.)

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Twelve Percent Less in Five Years

Mark Bittman, food columnist for The New York Times, talks about the reasons for a great trend in the U.S.: meat consumption is down 12 percent in the last five years. His conclusion: It has nothing to do with availability, prices, or any other external reason. Rather, people are eating less meat because they are choosing to eat less meat. Link.

Thought for the Day 16.0

From Seth Godin's blog:

One option is to struggle to be heard whenever you're in the room. Another is to be the sort of person who is missed when you're not.

The first involves making noise. The second involves making a difference.