5 - Concision

Summary

Concision is about more than writing like Hemingway or following Strunk & White’s edict to eliminate unnecessary words. Instead, concision relies on writers recognizing the myriad redundancies in English, a reflection of its evolution from the collision of Latin, French, and Old English in the decades following the Norman Conquest. Moreover, redundancies also litter English in the form of redundant modifiers, throat-clearing, and metadiscourse. By recognizing these words and phrases, writers can quickly pare sentences to their essentials, without fretting over the havoc deletions can wreak on the meaning of their sentences.