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‘Eliminate Every Superfluous Word’
- paweladamczuk 6y agoThe article reads like an exercise in the opposite
- V-2 6y agoThis was my impression as well. Well, being a non-native speaker I tend to blame myself. Still, this style of writing does sound self-indulgent to me: "Hemingway’s voice distilled itself with miraculous speed, a fusion of telegrammatic urgency and high modernist impersonality, with counterpoint learned from Bach and rhythms located profoundly in his own neurology" etc.
- throwanem 6y agoGood God. I write Lovecraft pastiche for fun and even I think that's way too purple.
- criddell 6y agoThe next sentence is "In the most beautiful way, it was anti-writing". That's somewhat revealing.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoYeah, I have no idea what the writer is saying. The only part of that I “get” is telegrammatic speed. What the hell is “high modernist impersonality”? I’m a native speaker and have read 3 Hemingway books.
- sjburt 6y agoI assume they mean modernism, the prevailing artistic style of the first half of the 20th century.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoI thought that was post-modernism?
- Jiocus 6y agoI have a mnemonic short story in my head that places modernists and post-modernists roughly in first and second half. > Post-modernism reacted to the modernists high ideals and empty promises. After all, it was their era (the modernists) that sparked the Great War which introduced the world to the new era industrialized warfare. Not once, but twice. Post-modernists arrived into this new Cold world that was left.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoAwesome. Thank you for sharing that.
- zwischenzug 6y agoEliminate superfluous words
- llarsson 6y agoThat was my thought, too, but the "every" makes it a stronger mandate than what both of us came up with. Without the "every", you could let some questionably superfluous words stay.
- zeckalpha 6y agoThen you’ve not eliminated
- dwaltrip 6y agoYou have, just not all.
- dwaltrip 6y agoSeconding this. The “every” is necessary.
- Avshalom 6y agoWell if we want a strong mandate we can go with Eliminate!
- dctoedt 6y ago> Eliminate! Which — without context — could be misinterpreted, say as a certain biological function. The goal is not brevity bragging rights, à la code golf: The goal is to serve the reader, and sometimes a few extra words, well-chosen and -placed, can help. (Also: A few extra words can serve as cheap insurance against ambiguity, which can be critical in contract drafting.)
- Avshalom 6y agoSure but taking advantage of context is how most brevity works. For instance which words are superfluous is context dependent. Also "eliminate every superfluous word" is good advice primarily in context of the question "how do I improve my writing", it's terrible advice for "how do I stop pooping so much".
- wantoncl 6y agoSale: Baby shoes, unworn.
- bigmattystyles 6y agoThe title reminds one of Orwell’s essay on the English language. Other than his essay about having to shoot an elephant, it’s my favorite. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- redbar0n 6y agoI was going to conclude with an exhausted sigh of TL;DR (ironically enough), but then I scrolled down to the bottom and found the gist: " I think the following rules will cover most cases: i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. "
- pmichaud 6y agoThe article seems like a caricature of itself, but to the sentiment of the title: the devil’s in the details. I think people tend to imagine Hemingway as spare prose and pithy sentences, and when they try to mimic their stereotype of him, they end up with dry prose and dead sentences. Real Hemingway had range, often wrote long, descriptive sentences. And here we find the devil: The trick isn’t wringing your prose down to a clear, factual account. The trick is knowing in the first place what is “necessary” to convey the truth of whatever writing. “What literally occurred” is only one possible angle on this, and focus on that is neither necessary nor sufficient to create artful prose. Depending on the piece you may focus on what occurred, the feeling and mood of it, the reader’s relationship to any of it, or the questions any of the above evokes—-if the question is “what might this prose be _for_, at its heart?” then the list of answers is endless. And so the answer to the question “which words are necessary?” is “any of them might be, depending on what you intend to convey and to whom.” So yes, eliminate every superfluous word, fine. Also, apply only the necessary paint strokes to the canvas. This advice is not helpful for a beginner, it’s only useful to someone who has artistry to convey and enough craft to bear critique.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoIt's not terrible advice because beginners tend to overwrite. This is why you'll find fantasy novels where the first page is scene setting, usually with a twist of the picturesque which is supposed to awe the reader. But nothing much happens until paragraph 5, by which time no one cares, because they want a novel, not a tour guide. ("And on our left we have the Unicorn Park of Alkkl'Blah. Built by the Morgon Autarchy to commemorate their triumph in the Zoonac Wars of the third century, its thousand foot crystal spires are legendary for...") You can do a lot with a single telling detail. Instead of describing everything, describe one thing that sums up everything else. Leave the rest to the reader's imagination.
- mhb 6y ago...no one cares, because they want a novel, not a tour guide That criticism is pretty applicable to The Sun Also Rises. Two great sentences and a lot of setting description.
- joemaller1 6y agoStreaming on PBS, Monday April 5. I have no idea how to watch PBS on a TV anymore.
- Geezus_42 6y agoYou can still pick it up with an antenna but they also have an app.
- msla 6y agoYou need one of them special big display panels with an ATSC tuner built in. More seriously, in my experience (which includes some pretty boony boonies) the PBS stations are fairly easy to pick up with rabbit ears and a single scan. It's all the repeaters does the trick, I'm sure.
- motohagiography 6y agoFew people understand why they should eliminate those words. In fiction, the writer should be invisible unless they are a narrator. If you are a narrator, do it well, but if you are writing in the third person or omniscient view, don't "break the fourth wall" with editorial words that beg the question of whose judgment the word expresses. Hence the advice to strip out adverbs and re-write sentences that use words with the "-ly" suffix. Each one is a passive, begged question. If there is no person and character with intent associated with the adverb, strip it. The advice to eliminate superfluous words is not a recipe, it's a joke that is a variation on, if you want to be a good writer, only write the good stuff, or don't publish the bad stuff. Worshipping great writers won't make you a better writer any more than doing a cargo dance will get supplies dropped from the sky. If you want to write, have a story to tell, the rest is editing.
- SamoyedFurFluff 6y ago“ In fiction, the writer should be invisible unless they are a narrator.” I don’t actually think this is reasonable or possible. Readers are fully aware that writers are distinct from other writers in their prose structure. This is colloquially known as “style”. Additionally, other writers can most certainly identify individual writers by their narrative choices based on the same notion of “style”. Hemingway had a style and that’s why so many people compare their prose to him!
- motohagiography 6y agoCrappy writing isn't a style unless it's on purpose, and often not even then. A great example of this is Philip K. Dick, who was a terrible writer by any standard, and not on purpose either, but he still became a great author because the overall effects of his ideas were so good that readers tolerated his crappy writing. The total effect of his ideas were his unique style, not his clunky dialogue or characters with less animation than action figures. He was like the Sex Pistols of science fiction in that he could barely play his instrument, but made the equivalent to some pop hits and he inspired a lot of other much better people to get over their own fears and write. Authors certainly have a voice, but it's because the whole story is told in it, and not because they interject to comment and give the reader direction using extra descriptions from a perspective that is outside the story. It would be like a director addressing the audience or an "applause" sign. When I read fiction, I read it to appreciate the effect of the author's craft, and not to listen to someone sounding things out and practising. Adverbs aren't forbidden, but I see them as cribs for re-editing because they are usually placeholders for unformed ideas.
- kleton 6y agoWaste no word There, removed an extra word
- throwaway823882 6y ago> Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves. "“I read that paragraph and I want to cry,” confesses a literary scholar in Hemingway." What? That paragraph was horrible. First of all, after reading it two times, I still have no idea what the point was, other than: leaves, dust, troops. Second, he says the same thing three times. "Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the trees." Ok. "The trunks of the trees too were dusty" No shit. There's dust raised in the air high enough to get to the leaves. It's probably gonna be on the trunk. "and the leaves fell early that year" Wait. Did they already fall? Or are they falling now? Or is this an omniscient narrator saying they will in the future? "and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising" Yes, you told us in the last sentence. "and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling" Oh, ok, so the leaves are falling now. "and the soldiers marching" Yes, you told us in the last sentence, and previously in the current sentence.
- rimliu 6y agoThey watched soldiers marching by for months.
- ilamont 6y agoStephen King railed dogmatically against the use of adverbs. I liked his work but wasn't aware of this ... obsession of his until I read On Writing. It made me more self-conscious about using adverbs in my own writing until I noticed that many great writers I love and respect had no such issue with incorporating adverbs. As my grandfather used to say, chacun à son goût - to each his own.
- bassrattle 6y agoIn George Orwell's 1984, Newspeak was a language formed by eliminating all of the words deemed unnecessary. The idea was, limit words and you may limit thoughts. While brevity can make a sentence more powerful, getting in the habit of eliminating words might be dangerous.
- andrewflnr 6y agoUsing fewer words in a sentence is accomplished by having more words in your vocabulary.
- karaterobot 6y agoI think the meaning is different enough that it's not the same thing. Editors and writers talk about excising unnecessary words from specific sentences where they aren't helping the reader understand your meaning. But, they're not saying that you should remove those words from your vocabulary and never use them, which is what Newspeak was about.
- b0afc375b5 6y ago“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick” -Kevin Malone
- stevenalowe 6y agoTitle corrected: eliminate superfluous words
- canadianfella 6y agoMeaning isn’t the same.
- lurquer 6y agoHow about: “Write Sparsely”
- lurquer 6y agoOftentimes, intentionally using superfluous words, particularly obscure words, is important in building mood. Lovecraft for instance. And Robert Howard (author of Conan). And, the granddaddy of all: Thomas Carlyle whose “French Revolution” is packed with metaphor, simile, superfluous words, and convoluted sentences... indeed, he made fun of the way he writes in “Sartur Resartus” in a hilarious fashion.