How to declutter your writing, according to William Zinsser
In his classic guide on writing nonfiction, On Writing Well, teacher and author William Zinsser shares a simple trick he used with his Yale students to help them declutter their papers:
Brackets [ ] ( ) { }
When going over his students' work, he would simply put brackets around every word, sentence component, or whole sentence that “wasn’t doing useful work.”
Typical instances where he would bracket a single word included:
An unnecessary preposition after a verb: “open [up]”
Adverbs that carry the same meaning as the verb: “frown [unhappily]”
Adjectives that state the obvious or a known fact: “[tall] skyscraper”
Or “little qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit”:
a bit
sort of
in a sense
He would also bracket entire sentences - most often in cases where they were just repeating what a previous sentence already said or was saying something the reader didn’t need to know.
The reason Zinsser used brackets around the students’ useless words and sentences, instead of crossing them out, was so that they could analyse and decide for themselves:
I was saying, “I may be wrong, but I think this can be deleted and the meaning won’t be affected. But you decide. Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works.”
Early in the semester, Zinsser says, he was handing back papers littered with brackets. But after a while, his students learned to do the work themselves by putting their own “mental brackets” around their clutter and were handing in mostly clean papers by the end of the term.
I’ve been implementing this practice in my own writing and have been horrified to find how much useless clutter is mucking up my prose.
See, I think I even did it just there. Did you catch it?
I’ve been implementing this practice in my [own] writing and have been horrified to find how much [useless] clutter is mucking up my prose.
Do I need the word ‘own’ there or can I just say in ‘my writing’? That works just as well doesn’t it?
And is ‘clutter’ ever useful? Maybe sometimes, but in this context do I need that adjective in front of the noun?
Here is another example of a sentence from my own writing I just applied this technique to:
Wait, let me fix that:
Here is another example [of a sentence] from my [own] writing I [just] applied this technique to:
Ok, that’s better. Here’s another from one of my current drafts:
It’s [a bit of] a catch-22, [sort of], when you think about it. Do I jog [slowly] or sprint [as fast as I can] and risk injury?
Doesn’t it read better like this without the clutter?
I would urge you to try this out with your writing, so you can reap the benefits of decluttering your prose. It’s already improved my writing immensely in such a short period of time.
By using brackets, rather than deleting, you’ll get a clear picture of how many unnecessary words and sentences you are using. It will also help train your eyes to pick up clutter faster so you can eliminate it on the spot. While your writing will never be entirely free of clutter, this simple tool helps you get closer to the mark.
The exact percentage always varies (Zinsser approximates it at about 50%), but a good general rule of writing is the first draft can always be made shorter and in doing so, made better. This is not only a fun exercise but also something you should be excited to use to improve your final product.
Or as Zinsser says:
“Be grateful for everything you can throw away.”
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