Less is more: Trust your reader

I leave out the parts that people skip.”

Elmore Leonard (who knows a thing or two about catchy writing)

On a recent road trip to another province, our family chose The Da Vinci Code as our audiobook of choice. We noted the 17 hours length with some trepidation, but the book started out great, with an intriguing plot line and a wealth of esoteric information. As the hours rolled by, though, that information began to overwhelm the pacing and plot of the story. Dan Brown could never give just one example of a cryptic puzzle—he had to give four, or five, in detail. About ten hours in, despite our curiosity about the characters, we gave up. I know the book was a bestseller, so clearly it has a strong fan base, but I firmly believe a strong-minded editor could have cut that book down by a third and made it more compelling.

Which bring me to my point: trust your reader to get the message the first time you say it. Use one potent example, instead of offering up four just because you have them at hand. Less is more.

As a copy editor and structural editor, I spend a good deal of time with any manuscript eliminating redundancy and repetition. With academic articles, I find authors usually circle back to repeat the same points in their conclusion. Some wrapping-up of thoughts is useful, but you need to make sure you are presenting the thought in a slightly new and interesting way. Simply repeating the content of your introduction does a disservice to your article and to your argument. Similarly, at the end of a section, one sentence is more than enough to conclude. Three or four sentences are redundant, and your article will seem padded. Mastery of a subject means being able to present it in the most concise way possible.

With creative writing, I spot redundancy most often when a writer is trying to work through a scene or an idea, and they keep coming at it from slightly different angles. Without meaning to, they end up using the same phrases or images. When you have worked on a piece of writing for a long time, and possibly gone through at least a few drafts, it can be hard to spot the repetition yourself. A good editor will make sure your writing is succinct: It says just enough, and not too much.

Your reader will thank you for it.

Photo credit for trash bin XoMEoX, on Flickr.