Let's talk about how you can be more concise in your writing, and I'm going to
give some fairly practical and specific advice about what to look out for. The
first thing to watch out for is what we might call overlapping sentences, so overlap
in your sentences. You can see here that the second sentence starts out
by simply summarizing and repeating the first sentence. We read, "They should
not have backed their own governments because wars between nations benefit
capitalist owners," and all of this up to "because" -- all of this repeats the first
part ("Lenin believed that European socialists should not have supported
World War I"). What we can do is we can simply scratch this all out and start
our sentence with "wars," and leave it implied that we're continuing the
thought from the previous sentence. That's a good one to watch out for
because it's quite common. But it's not the case that overlap is always wrong.
When you're writing for conciseness you have to make a decision.
Sometimes more words is better, because it creates a sense of style
and it can be more impressive. It allows you to flesh out your ideas. So just because
you use more words is not necessarily a bad thing. The second one here --something
else to watch out for -- is what we might call a double. A double is a couple
of words working together as a pair or a team. This is very frequent in people's
writing, that they use a couple of words where they could just use one. And they
do it because it gives a certain weightiness to their writing. But often
they're simply using synonyms, and you can do with one. In this sentence, we read,
"If you are bitten by a Lone Star tick, you may become allergic to red meat ..."
That's kind of interesting, especially if you're vegetarian I suppose. Maybe you
should start sharing or spreading Lone Star ticks! We read, "The tick passes
on a sugar molecule called Alpha-Gal." Sounds kind of friendly! "...that may affect
and change your immune system. At present there is no cure or remedy." We have two
doubles. We have "effect and change" and "cure or remedy," and when you
when you come across these doubles you have to decide whether you like them or
not. They're not necessarily bad, but you could easily just use one word in each
case. So you could say "change your immune
system" ("change" is more specific than "effect"), and you could pick "cure," let's say --
or pick a word that's not a synonym. The third one here simply uses a bunch of
expressions that are wordy. Sometimes, if an instructor is marking your writing,
he or she may use the word "verbose." So "verbose" is just a fancy way of saying
"wordy" (perhaps somewhat ironic), and there are lots of things that can make your
writing wordy. We start by using a longer kind of expression ...
where you could substitute a single word. So we say "due to the fact that" and we
could simply say "because" or "since." "Because you are well and truly over the
limit I'm going to have to impound your car."
Watch out also for pat phrases like "well and truly" -- not really necessary in
writing. And then the last thing here is to watch out for wordy verb phrases.
This one says "I am going to have to [impound]." That's a lot of verbs, and you can simply
say "I have to." So we'll get rid of that. Then all that's left is "Because
you are over the limit, I have to impound your car." It's going to take you a little
bit sometimes to get to this level, where you can see these mistakes, but I would
encourage you to really pay attention to any way in which you can make your
writing more concise -- not because you always have to but because it gives you
a certain ability and a certain power to change your writing and to be more
persuasive and more effective. The next one has to do with hyperbole,
so exaggeration. And it's even a sentence that talks about exaggeration.
This one says, "He very much exaggerated when he said that the planet is
completely doomed." Watch out for words like "very" or "completely." They're very
strong words and you can often do without. We could say, "He exaggerated
when he said that the planet is doomed," and the sentence reached just fine
without the exaggeration. Then the last one here has to do with simple
redundancy ... and you can see that all of these categories, all of
these aspects of conciseness overlap. But we have a bunch of phrases here that are
not necessary. And we read, "I really appreciated that you presented this
distinctly different perspective." We can get rid of "really." That's a common one we
use in speech to affirm what we're saying. But in writing it's often not
necessary. "Distinctly different" -- this is also one of these pat phrases that
people use. But "distinctly" here is quite redundant. If it is different it's
going to be distinct! And now we're left with "I appreciated that you presented a
different perspective." We can still make this shorter if we want to, and we could
say "I appreciated your perspective." That's all we would have to say
and that would be probably as concise as we could make it. Those are a few ways
to think about conciseness. Watch out for doubles, and verbose writing,
hyperbole, redundancy, and overlap, and if you do these things then I can guarantee
you that your writing will definitely be more concise and hopefully more powerful.