The Blog Editing Process

Posted in Blogging, Wordpress by Elliott Back on August 6th, 2006.

The Blog Herald posted a random quote from Wordcamp which I find a bit too simplistic:

If you can write something in 1000 words, why write it in 2000? If you can write it in 1000 words, you can write it in 500 words. If you can write it in 500 words, you can write it in 200 words. Those 200 words have to be the best quality words that convey the message.

The issue isn’t about how many words you use, or your verbosity, or paring down a message by orders of magnitude. What I was taught was more along these lines:

Write so that every word has an essential purpose in your prose. When you cut, cut out words, phrases, and sentences that add nothing.

The focus on short scares me–the focus should be on excellent writing. Perhaps the adjective “terse” would be appropriate. Terse prose can be both long and short, but it always packs a punch.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 3:41 am and is tagged with 1000 words, orders of magnitude, verbosity, scares, adjective, best quality, prose, sentences, phrases, punch, wordcamp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

Viewing 1 Comment

Brady J. Frey 2 years ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

I agree completely, it's nice to hear someone else wonder that out loud - and I've heard many an odd comment in this regard, as if new age media writing should repeat the same mistakes traditional writing has long grown past. We were talking on another post about how they noted 'don't write for yourself, write for your audience' - which I think is half true... writing for marketing and audience interaction of course requires wording for your demographic, but not at the expense of writing about what is your interest or passion. If you were to spend your time writing for everyone else, I'm sure the content would be stale from start to finish.

reply edit reblog flag

http://www.dotfive.com