Want a free sample of what you’ll be getting every day in January if you sign up for the WordCraft Writers' Resolution Virtual Boot Camp? Check out this post on concision, precision, and rhythm—three elements that focus specifically on improving sentence strength. Like this one, each day’s post is designed to work for fiction or nonfiction. You’ll get inspiration, practical advice, prompts, and links to more information on each day’s topic. Interested? Take a look the whole month’s calendar.
Concision, Precision, and Rhythm
Language is more than words. Language is music and rhythm; it is sound, rhyme, and sibilance; it is texture and layers. Art and graffiti. Language is attitude and place, geography and history. Language is family and what you heard at the kitchen table and on the back porch, muffled behind closed doors and shouted up from stairwells. Language is what you do with words and it is the silence between the words. — Judy Reeves
Plot is important. Characters are important. Yet many writers and critics would say what makes fiction and memoir “literary” is the level of attention paid to the sentence. Concision, precision, and rhythm are three elements that focus specifically on improving sentence strength, although they can be applied to paragraphs and concepts as well. One excellent method for this type of revising is reading aloud and listening to how the writing sounds.
Concision, otherwise known as brevity, is the technique of making things concise—every word serves a purpose. Einstein once said that you should make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. He was talking about the theory of relativity, but this idea applies to clarity of expression as well. Concision does not mean your work is bland or unadorned; it means you have used your mastery of the language to choose the perfect, most precise, and as a result, most interesting way to express an idea.
Precision most often refers to word choice. Focusing on precision can mean that you replace two or more words with the one word that conveys their combined meaning. It helps to have a wide vocabulary, but just reading will expand your tool kit of words. For example, instead of writing a “rocky cliff,” you could use the word “crag.” Instead of writing “confused and agitated,” you might write “delirious.” In the first example, I had originally written “instead of saying a ‘rocky cliff’,” but we’re not considering your speaking style, so I changed it to “writing” to be precise. Be most creative with your verbs.
Rhythm is harder to define, but thinking of music can help. Songs don’t hit the same monotonous beat over and over. A song may begin slowly, adding instruments as the momentum builds, hit the bridge with a lot of energy, but then slow down again for the second verse. Using variation in sentence and paragraph length and pacing the delivery of details can create the same effect. Gary Provost makes it clear:
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
This excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory may not be the most concise passage, but you can’t deny his precision and rhythm. Note the use of alliteration, how adjacent words echo vowel sounds (bog/caught, cry/snipe, musk/musty), and how varying sentence length adds cadence. Also note the specificity of his word choice.
After making my way through some pine groves and alder scrub I came to the bog. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of diptera around me, the guttural cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sound of the morass under my foot, than I knew I would find here quite special arctic butterflies, whose pictures, or still better, nonillustrated descriptions I had worshipped for several seasons....Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species—vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
Prompt: Each of the following prompts will help you explore these stylistic strategies:
____Choose a paragraph you’ve written and cut it down to as few words as possible without losing any meaning. Now, without looking at the original, rebuild it with precise words and details.
____Take something you’ve written and combine every two sentences into one. Do not just add “and” between the ideas. Keep only what is necessary. Try to create modifying phrases. Change “A cat slinked into the kitchen. The dog left the room.” to “When the cat slinked into the kitchen, the dog left the room.” or "The antagonistic animals switched rooms."
____Choose a paragraph you’ve written, preferably on the longer side, and count the words. Revise the paragraph by cutting 20%.
Consult the following resources for more information on concision, precision, and rhythm:
Amanda Christy Brown and Katherine Schulten, “Writing Rules! Advice from The New York Times on Writing Well”
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
Michelle Seaton, “A Short Course in Line Editing”
Sign up for the Writers' Resolution Virtual Boot Camp today!
Sunday, March 30, 2014 at 9:56AM 
