I can’t stop talking. Take me to a house party or an elegant dinner with respectable people, and I can’t shut up. I try to sound exciting, get laughs, or even come across like an Oxford grad. I shake myself into not speaking at certain social occasions for fear of rejection or outcast. I cut the nonsense, and my social acceptability has changed, perhaps even increased.
Writers have this problem too. Consider Truman Capote’s words: “I believe more in the scissors than I do the pencil.” More is said with less. I’ll let Zinsser, from On Writing Well, drive it home:
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
Who can understand the viscous language of everyday American commerce and enterprise: the business letter, the interoffice memo, the corporation report, the notice from the bank explaining its latest “simplified” statement? What member of an insurance or medical plan can decipher the brochure that tells him what his costs and benefits are? What father or mother can put together a child’s toy—on Christmas Eve or any other eve—from the instructions on the box? Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn’t dream of saying that it may rain. The sentence is too simple—there must be something wrong with it.
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.
*Excerpt from On Writing Well by William Zinsser New York, Harper pg. 9
