When Every Word Counts
Leveraging Language Economy
Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life. It is the time of year where no one knows how to dress because it’s wintertime in the morning and summertime in the afternoon: Fall. We hosted our annual fall party here last week and learned some new things about apples:
The Hidden Rose apple is yellow outside but pink inside.
Not all green apples are tart; the Green Dragon apple is very sweet.
The York apple apparently tastes like cheese to some people, but not all. Perhaps there is a gene similar to the cilantro-tastes-like-soap gene some people have. More research needed. We’ll be applying for NIH funding ahead of next year’s party.
Anyway, apples are like writing because the first 20 percent about apples is really easy to learn and know, the common knowledge part, and many people never need or want to know more. The common knowledge part is plenty to get by. But if you do want to know more, the other 80 percent will blow you away. There are more than 7,500 varieties of apple grown worldwide and I’ve tried like 30 of them and I’m already one of the apple connoisseurs among the people I know.
In other Fall news, ’tis the season to write performance evaluations at work, at least at my work. This is among everyone’s least-favorite Fall activities. I asked 10 people if they would rather go on a hayride or write a performance evaluation and all 10 said hayride. Zero out of 10 people recommend performance evaluations. Anyway, at my job the performance evaluation process changes each year for reasons no one understands, and this year they seem to require even more writing than they have in past years and my boss told me not to go overboard, don’t write a whole novel to answer the prompts, just keep it short. For a split second I was going to ask her for a word-count limit—1,000 words? 2,500? 10,000? But I thought better of it just before the request came out of my mouth.
I’m terrible at writing to a word count limit and I sincerely think I would have more success publishing short fiction if I were better at it. Not only are my better stories longer than the maximum word count for the venues I think would appreciate them most, but even when I am within the allowable word count I’m usually toward the high end of the range. Many anthologies and magazines prefer shorter stories to longer ones; this isn’t a secret and many editors are transparent about the preference. Given a budget—whether it’s a budget to buy stories by the word, or a budget of pages to fill per issue or volume, or both—you can include more stories for the same budget if you choose shorter stories over longer ones. All things being otherwise equal between two stories, an editor will choose the shorter one.
Brevity is obviously not my strong suit.
I am often in the position of deciding whether to cut text and otherwise wordsmith to reduce word count, like some kind of literary boxer taking diuretics to make weight, or giving up on submission opportunities. Therefore, finding shortcuts to make my language use briefer, more concise, and more economical is one of my fond writing pastimes.
Today I’m going to share some of the tricks I use as a writer and editor for getting word count down when it matters and I have to. I’ll point readers toward an earlier Shelf Life, Fashions and Fictions, for my thoughts on the pervasive belief in spare, lean, concise writing as inherently superior to other types (spoiler alert: I do not agree) and where it comes from. In short, I do not believe in striving for brevity and conciseness in writing for their own sake; concise is not everyone’s writing style and this is fine. I don’t believe we should all be out here universally measuring our own writing against Hemingway and asking ourselves what Strunk and White would think.
However, there are times when you just have to cut it down.
Magazine has a 5,000-word limit for submissions and you’re at 5,200 words? Get rid of some words.
Writing your resume? Space on page 1 is priceless.
Querying an agent? Good Lorde you need to be concise.
When in need, I have two methods for reducing word count and those are:
Machete
Scalpel
Today’s Shelf Life is about using the scalpel. I’ll talk about using the machete another day; maybe Thursday and maybe not. We’ll see how I feel.
When you approach word count with a scalpel, first of all, you are not going to lose word count to the same degree as if you approach it with a machete. You will be successful if you reduce word count by 5 percent with the scalpel method. In other words, on a 5,000-word manuscript you might lose 250 words. When you use this method, you are not altering the content meaningfully; you are only altering it semantically—utilizing different words and constructions to say the same thing.
Depending on how concise you are to begin with, in your drafting mode, you may have less to work with—fewer opportunities to replace wordy constructions with concise ones. Someone who is already very economical with words may find no profit at all in this exercise (but such a person is, perhaps, not routinely exceeding word count limits and looking to shrink text).
I’m going to represent the following categories as red flags not because they mean a place where you can cut text for sure but because they warn you there may be an opportunity to cut text wherever you see them.
Red Flag: To Be or Not To Be
I have found a frequent culprit in wordiness and prime target for reduction by scalpel is infinitive verb phrases. They have their place by wherever infinitive verb phrases are thrown around there’s usually an opportunity to reduce.
Consider the following phrase:
“Are they going to be able to carry the treadmill up the stairs?”
This is a perfectly ordinary sentence to say in everyday life and in fact I’m pretty sure I said it, or some variant, the other day when my partner insisted on carrying a treadmill up the stairs. The presence of the word “to” twice and the phrase “to be” are red flags for me to review this sentence a second time. Can I revise for economy of language here and say the same thing?
“Can they carry the treadmill up the stairs?”
Result: The meaning is largely the same, but I reduced sentence length 38 percent.
Infinitives have a place in all writing and not every infinitive can or should be rewritten. However, in many cases an infinitive form (“to be”) can be replaced with the present participle to save a word. It’s only one word you’re saving, but it’s also 50 percent of the words in the construction so the effect scales with the amount of infinitives you use.
To err is human, to forgive divine. → Erring is human, forgiving divine.
To sleep, perchance to dream. → Sleeping, maybe dreaming.
To boldly go → Boldly going
If you have a tendency to stack up infinitives and prepositional phrases like I do, going through any word and looking for fat to trim can make a quick difference in word count and in the quality of the text.
Red Flag: Gerunds
A gerund is a verb used as a noun; put another way, when a verb ends in “ing” it’s usually either a present participle (mentioned above) or a gerund. Like infinitive verbs, gerunds have their place and not every instance of a gerund can or should be removed or replaced to cut word count. However, gerunds sometimes indicate a place where the author could be more concise. Most gerunds can be replaced by a different form of the same verb.
Consider the following phrase:
Being rude to your server is ugly behavior.
Absolutely bog standard true sentence. However, rather than using the gerund “being rude” we could simply use the nominal form:
Rudeness to your server is ugly behavior.
You can also swap two-word gerunds for more concise gerunds when a gerund is really the most appropriate type of word. Consider:
Getting up early, getting dressed, and putting on makeup are the worst parts of returning to the office.
Truer words, right? This sentence uses three gerunds of two words each: “getting up,” “getting dressed,” and “putting on.” However, this sentence relies on verbs used as nouns—I’m describing three things (a person, place, or thing is always a noun) I dislike about returning to the office for work. However, there’s still a more elegant way to say this if I use more-concise gerunds:
Rising early, dressing, and applying makeup are the worst parts of returning to the office.
Truthfully I love dressing and applying makeup but the early rising is for the birds.
Red Flag: Adverbs
Adverbs! We love to hate adverbs, right? In Silence of the Adverbs I did a deep dive on this unfairly maligned part of speech. In short, adverbs are a necessary part of the English language and advice to omit adverbs from one’s writing is bad advice. However, overuse of -ly adverbs in particular is inadvisable and a great place to lose some words if you’re over your preferred word count.
Not all -ly adverbs are misused. Including some -ly adverbs is fine. However, it’s a good practice—whether you need to reduce word count or not!—to look over any first draft for -ly adverbs and see which of them are ripe to replace with a descriptive verb. If you know about yourself as a writer—like I know about myself as a writer—you overrely on -ly adverbs, this exercise should just be a regular part of your revision process.
For me, it’s always easier to use an -ly adverb plus verb construction in the moment than to think of the better, more descriptive verb. Replacing adverb phrases with better verbs is my first pass on every revision. Super easy to do when I’m in revision mode but I find if I stop myself while drafting every time I drop an -ly adverb plus verb phrase to think of the verb I need, I impede my draft. Your mileage may vary.
Walk slowly → stroll
Examine meticulously → scrutinize
Dance happily → frolic
Red Flag: That
Finally, the word that. Let me tell you something interesting about this word: You literally never need to use it. It can always be written around. There is always another way to say something without using that. Writing around that won’t always save words; sometimes you’ll have to add words to omit that, which is the opposite of what you want in this case. However, in many cases, that can simply be deleted without changing the meaning of the surrounding text at all. It is often used as a filler word and filler words should be struck without hesitation.
As a case in point, if you care to read again closely you may notice this Shelf Life does not use the word that except in this section. Before I reviewed and removed it I had 10 instances. I was able to remove all 10 in under three minutes and most were simply deleted with no further edits needed.
Further, constructions using that are often wordier than they need to be; it’s not just the word that but other surrounding words as well. When you have a that you cannot simply delete, a moment’s consideration may demonstrate the whole sentence can be overhauled for something much more concise. For instance:
I like to think that I don’t overuse the word that.
The entire “I like to think” construction that precedes that is unnecessary and wordy. Sure, I could just remove that and the sentence still stands. However, I could more easily and concisely say,
I don’t think I overuse the word that.
False; I know I overuse the word that.
In conclusion, to wrap all this up, the red flags I’ve identified today for wordiness are:
Be
To
That
Adverbs that end in -ly
Gerunds (verbs used as nouns, often ending in -ing).
To this end, one could easily create a Word processor search protocol, either manually or using a macro, to search for:
Be
To
That
*ly (wildcard ell why space)
*ing (wildcard eye en gee space)
These searches will quickly show you all instances in your text of “be,” “to,” “that,” words ending in -ly, and words ending in -ing. If any of the abovementioned red flags turn up in your writing as indicators of wordiness, this search will save you time in finding and eliminating those unneeded words.
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