As the chatterbox Polonius puts it, “brevity is the soul of wit”. Much in the same way, the ‘concise’ has always been held in high regard by the most verbose of orators, leaders and activists. With Twitter we are seeing a resurgence of concise writing, but can tweets hope to be precise? Maybe they can.
A positive definition of precise writing: writing accurately only about what is at hand. Negatively put, precise means avoiding excess words and distractions, but a precise description could certainly be thorough if the matter is complex. Precise writing does not have to carry the burden of truth, ever the charge of sophistry aimed at rhetoricians, but it should be ethical: Precise writing is vigilant when carefully examining the relation between its own wording and the topic, not aiming for an objective correspondence, but rendering more clearly the contours of an argument from the writer. It means choosing the right words for the right effect: A simple act of description is the most persuasive argument, especially as it does not present itself as such. In this lies the danger and responsibility in precise wording and the exact turn of phrase.
How to concisely say precisely what you mean to? It seems the question confronts the two major causes of writers block, according to Graham Harman, nothingness and infinity.
Concise writing requires a precise view of things, should it hope to seize on the matter’s most poignant features. Saying infinitely much by writing next to nothing, it is a trust in the imagination of the reader, choosing the sufficient amount of detail to evoke the broader scope of things. It is in concise writing that writers confront the odd proportion between words and meaning, that great words do not in themselves convey great meaning: A juxtaposition of small words could easily convey a profound impression of great truth.
January 6, 2013 at 00:04
On a side note, perhaps: Concision can sometimes be a matter of economics. Simonides of Ceos was the first poet to charge money for his services, and apparently became particularly adept at short, concise poems
He also happened to be a master of epitaphs, an art restricted by the physical space available on the tombstone – and by the cost charged by the stonecutter (?) to carve each letter.
Interesting topic!
January 6, 2013 at 14:55
Haha! Epitaphs, of course, the undying tweet. Not at all side note: Writing is always a matter of time and, therefore, economics. The irony is that the time it takes to read a short sentence is often inversely proportional with the time that it took to write.