Techniques to Make Your Writing Concise

"She was driven to the point of suicide by Ron," " Angelina was in love with Brad," "She made the bride look pretty and beautiful." Now, all three sentences might sound right in colloquial English; however, when it comes to academic writing, only one of it is correct. So, let us check the three sentences again. Of the three, doesn't the sentence "Angelina was in love with Brad" sound better than the other two? If so, there is a reason for it. 

It is clear and concise. That is why it strikes out. It is easier to read, easier to understand and ensures there is no ambiguity anywhere.

From these examples, it is easy to understand that writing concisely or editing content to make it concise is one of the most useful skills any person ought to learn if they want to make an impactful impression on the reader. Therefore, in this post, we will cover all the methods that will make your writing clearer and more concise.

Eliminate and Eradicate Redundancy!

Redundancy is perhaps the most common problem of writing style. Redundancy is nothing but the repetition of words, paragraphs, ideas, and words that do not add anything new to the sentence. These make the sentence longer and reduce the effectiveness of the intended message. The sentence “she made the bride look pretty and beautiful” mentioned above is a good example. Pretty and beautiful are nearly the same words and both do not need to be together. Here are a few more illustrative examples.

·     She wore small, tiny slippers that hurt her feet.

·     In my opinion, I would like to state that the canteen needs urgent renovation.

·     The river merged together with the sea.

If we were to remove the redundant words from these sentences, we would obtain the following:

·     She wore tiny slippers that hurt her feet.

·     I would like to state that the canteen needs urgent renovation.

·     The river merged with the sea.

Now, we have a sense of how to reduce redundancy. But how do we identify which words are to be kept and which ones to eliminate?

Let us now explore the techniques that will help us make any sentence concise.

Let us look at the first example:

·     She wore small, tiny slippers that hurt her feet.

We first try and understand the meaning the speaker is trying to convey. Here, the speaker is trying to express that the (female person) wore slippers that were too small and which hurt her feet. From this, we can gauge that the most important words here are she, tiny, slippers, hurt, and feet. You could opt for small instead of tiny; however, tiny is more descriptive.

Now let us consider a more complicated example.

·     She would like to state that she did not feel the reciprocation of feelings towards Daniel.

In this rather convoluted sentence, let us understand what the speaker is trying to say. The speaker is saying that she wanted to say she did not feel the same way that Daniel felt. Let us pick out the most important words: she, state, reciprocate, feelings, and Daniel. With these five words, we can communicate more or less the exact meaning that the speaker was trying to communicate in the convoluted sentence. The new sentence would read

·     She stated she could not reciprocate Daniel’s feelings.

Now here we have covered how sentences can be made more concise. However, there are also common redundant phrases. Here are a few examples:

·     Twelve midnight should be written as simply midnight.

·     Circle around should be written as simply around.

·     End result should be written as simply result.

·     Exactly the same should be written as simply the same.

Another common mistake is that people tend to use the word “that” excessively. Let us understand the same with the help of a few examples.

·     What I was saying was that we should meet more often.

Instead the sentence could be written

·     What I was saying was we should meet more often

Let us understand using another example.

·     We know that she was late.

We actually do not need “that” in this sentence. It could be easily rewritten as follows

·     We know she was late.

Here’s a trick. If you have written a sentence containing the relative pronoun that, try re-writing it without the word and read the sentence aloud. If the sentence makes perfect sense, you didn’t need the word that.

Remove Unnecessary Phrases

Unnecessary phrases like “As a matter of fact,” “due to the fact,” and “in due course of time,” are to be avoided. These are phrases that simply add to the length of a sentence and do not serve any other purpose. Here are two illustrative examples.

·     As a matter of fact, she was really tired.

This sentence can be easily rewritten as  “She was really tired.” Doing so cuts five words and 19 characters.

·     Due to the fact he was rich, he would regularly go on luxury holidays.

 This can be easily rewritten as “Because he was rich, he would regularly go on luxury holidays.”

This post should have given you a good idea of how to make concise sentences. There are many more ways in which redundancy can be avoided. We will cover them in future posts. If you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to ask me.