Be brief! – Welcome to Third Age Thoughts

– In which Dorn contemplates the virtues of blog brevity.

Maybe you’ve noticed that I often put headers on paragraphs in my blog posts. I used to do this with my work emails too. You might think this is evidence of how organized I am, but you’d be wrong–it’s an indication of how I can get so wordy that if I don’t introduce some kind of organization into my message, the whole meaning can get lost.

To counter the trend for my posts to get ever longer, today I’ll write about, and try to epitomize, the concept of using the fewest words to completely convey the message I want to send.

Message content, of course, is measured in C-units, short for communication units, according to Prof. Alfred Valdez of New Mexico University: “Communication units are defined as ‘an independent clause and its modifiers’. A communication unit is an utterance that cannot be further divided without the disappearance of its essential meaning…” *

You know what, please mentally strike that last paragraph. You can tell a communication unit when you see one, even if you don’t call it that. That will shorten this post by two paragraphs (counting this one)!

I learned to respect, if not practice, brevity from that old standby, Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I hope they are still using this in schools, it’s great. And very short–only 43 pages!

E. B. White is perhaps best known for Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. William Strunk isn’t better known for anything, to my knowledge. I include here a picture of the cover of Charlotte’s Web, so that when I link this to Facebook there will be a nice picture on display.

Strunk and White said of brevity,

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.

Please do not confuse Elements of Style with Chris Baker and Jacob Hansen’s book, Elements of F*cking Style, which addresses many of the same C-units of Strunk and White’s work, but also includes significant raunchy subtext (I’d be interested in figuring out how to measure the C-unit value of subtext).

I won’t repeat Mark Twain’s famous quip excusing the length of his writing, nor quote Cicero comparing overlong discourse to liquid overfilling the brainpan of one’s listener. I’ve already written more than I envisioned when my whole plan was to be pithy, so I’ll just say thanks!

-dorn
6/24/19

One thought on “Be brief!”