Blog 6

Show Who You Are

In his book, On Writing Well, William Zinnser posits that the average reader has a twenty-to thirty-second attention span. He therefore asks that our writing be concise. Concision, Zinnser argues, holds the reader’s attention. To back up his argument, Zinnser shows us William Strunk JR and EB White’s principle of “Omit Needless Words”:

"Vigorous writing is concise. 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. . . .Every word [must] tell."

Here’s the best way to make your words “tell”: Write with strong nouns and colorful verbs. Let’s look at an example:

Jethro is eating his sandwich.

Not a bad sentence, yet it’s generic. It tells us little. It describes a scene, but it doesn’t paint a picture. Now, let's look at what happens when we add some strong nouns and colorful verbs to this sentence:

Jethro gobbles his hoagie.

Get it? Can you see the difference? The above example goes overboard to make a point: we replaced the passive, "is eating," with the colorful verb, "gobbles," and the all-encompassing noun, "sandwich" with the strong, specific noun, "hoagie." And guess what? We even shortened the original sentence by one word! You see? Vigorous writing is concise!

For today's blog, please write a vigorous and concise account of your most memorable evening.