Mark Twain

“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself… Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”

In this particular quote, Mark Twain’s advice is to use the least amount of words as possible in your writing that will get your point across. He is also saying that this is a very difficult thing to do. I am an incredibly verbose writer. I like to write long sentences, and add in words that don’t need to be in my text. I write the way I think or talk, which can sometimes be fast and wordy. I’ve read many articles where at the end of the paper, I’m annoyed at how long it was because the point was so simple. I felt like that after reading David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University.” He could have cut that down to a couple pages. The only time I can understand loquacious writing is a case like Charles Dickens when he was paid by the word. Otherwise, I find editing numerous times helps me to cut out meaningless words.