Decluttering Your Writing
Countless wise writers advise against focusing too closely on your words and sentences in the initial drafting stage for the simple reason that over-focus on the prose can prevent you from completing a first draft. Many people have had the experience of writing the first sentence on a blank document only to delete and rewrite it over and over again. An hour might pass, and with it whatever energy or enthusiasm you brought to that day’s work. Let the words and sentences flow, secure in the knowledge that you will improve them later.
After completing a first draft and structural revisions using a technique like reverse outlining, it is time to begin focusing on the prose itself. This usually involves quite a lot of pruning. With a cutting room floor beneath you to catch the falling material, this process needn’t be feared.
“Omit needless words,” Cornell University English Professor William Strunk, Jr. told his students in his 1918 The Elements of Style. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
George Orwell echoed this advice in his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” advising that “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” William Zinsser and John McPhee provide actionable advice alongside similar admonitions. In the chapter on “Clutter” in his essential On Writing Well, Zinsser suggests that you read through your draft and place brackets around everything—words, clauses, sentences, paragraphs—that isn’t “doing useful work.” Placing brackets around clutter rather than crossing it out or deleting it on the spot provides the same sort of helpful psychological safety as the cutting room floor: there is less agonizing because you can rescue the material later if necessary. Read the piece again with the clutter removed. Has anything been lost? For me, the answer is almost always no. But every now and then I will restore a piece of clutter—usually rewritten—to the text.
Let’s use the first paragraph of this post as example of how Zinsser’s technique works. Underlined words are additions that do the work of the longer bracketed clutter phrases they replace:
[Countless] wise writers advise against [focusing too closely on] obsessing over your words and sentences in the initial drafting stage [for the simple reason that] because over-focus on the prose can prevent [you from completing] completion of a first draft. Many people have had the experience of writing the first sentence on a blank document only to delete and rewrite it over and over again. An hour might pass, and with it whatever energy [or enthusiasm] you brought to that day’s work. Let the words and sentences flow, secure in the knowledge that you will improve them later.
“Countless” and “or enthusiasm” might stay even though they are not strictly necessary. The piece reads better, to my eye, with the other bracketed bits of clutter replaced. Zinsser’s decluttering exercise will transform most people’s writing. Some pieces even benefit from multiple rounds of decluttering. I find the technique tremendously helpful for my own writing and when helping others with theirs.
But there is one final exercise that can take a piece of writing to another level of clarity. In his delightful piece on “Omission” in the New Yorker, John McPhee describes the “greening” process he learned working at Time early in his career. After submitting a finished article, the layout people would return galley proofs to the author with instructions to use a green pencil to cut a certain number of lines to make the piece fit in the space available in the magazine: “Green 3,” “Green 7,” and so on. McPhee came to understand that “greening was a craft in itself—studying your completed and approved product, your ‘finished’ piece, to see what could be left out.” He found the exercise so painfully useful that he inflicted it on decades of his students. Even the tightest piece of writing often can be trimmed still more without losing clarity. If you have a little more time before a piece has to be submitted, directing yourself to “Green 10%” of the words can produce a clarifying final polish.