Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

kill we must. In 1914 British author Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote it bluntly: "Murder your darlings."
    Such ruthlessness is best applied at the end of the process, when creativity can be moderated by coldhearted judgment. A fierce discipline must make every word count.
    "Vigorous writing is concise," wrote William Strunk in the first edition of The Elements of Style.
    A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.
    But how to do that?
    Begin by cutting the big stuff. Donald Murray taught me that brevity comes from selection, not compression, a lesson that requires lifting blocks from the work. When Maxwell Perkins edited Thomas Wolfe, he confronted manuscripts that could be weighed by the pound and delivered in a wheelbarrow. The famous editor once advised the famous author: "It does not seem to me that the book is over-written. Whatever comes out of it must come out block by block and not sentence by sentence." Perkins reduced one four-page passage about Wolfe's uncle to six words: "Henry, the oldest, was now thirty."
    If your goal is to achieve precision and concision, begin by pruning the big limbs. You can shake out the dead leaves later.
    • Cut any passage that does not support your focus.
    • Cut the weakest quotations, anecdotes, and scenes to give greater power to the strongest.
    • Cut any passage you have written to satisfy a tough teacher or editor rather than the common reader.
    • Don't invite others to cut. You know the work better. Mark optional trims. Then decide whether they should become actual cuts.
    Always leave time for revision, but if pressed, shoot for a draft and a half. That means cutting phrases, words, even syllables in a hurry. The paradigm for such word editing is the work of William Zinsser. In the second chapter of On Writing Well, he demonstrates how he cut the clutter from final drafts of his own book. "Although they look like a first draft, they had already been rewritten and retyped ... four or five times. With each rewrite I t ry to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that is not doing useful work."
    In his draft, Zinsser writes of the struggling reader: "My sympathies are entirely with him. He's not so dumb. If the reader is lost, it is generally because the writer of the article has not been careful enough to keep him on the proper path." That passage seems lean enough, so it's instructive to watch the author cut the fat. In his revision "entirely" gets the knife. So does "He's not so dumb." So does "of the article." And so does "proper." (I confess that I would keep "proper path," just for the alliteration. But "path" contains the meaning of "proper.")
    The revised passage: "My sympathies are with him. If the reader is lost, it is generally because the writer has not been careful enough to keep him on the path." Twenty-seven words outwork the original thirty-six. Targets for cuts include:
    • Adverbs that intensify rather than modify: just, certainly, entirely, extremely, completely, exactly.
    • Prepositional phrases that repeat the obvious: in the story, in the article, in the movie, in the city.
    • Phrases that grow on verbs: seems to, tends to, should have to, tries to.
    • Abstract nouns that hide active verbs: consideration becomes considers; judgment becomes judges; observation becomes observes.
    • Restatements: a sultry, humid afternoon.
    The previous draft of this essay contained 850 words (see below). This version contains 678, a savings of 20 percent.
    WORKSHOP
    1. Compare and contrast my longer draft with my shorter one. Which revisions make the essay better? Have I cut something you would have