Spot on, Fred. What began as an invigorating transgression against certain assumptions of modernism has now become an orthodoxy. It actually points to the way in which liberal literary culture and its market have reinforced tendencies which actually limit, not universalize, the range of literary expression— particularly, to use a time honored term, vernacular expression— and a lot of the inconvenient thoughts about the world that are often expressed there.
I once experienced an idiot’s attempt to tell me that tone cannot be expressed through writing…
I was duly shocked, but not surprised. He had previously attempted to lecture and gaslight me about contemporary social justice topics, quite hypocritically, of which I was well aware due to my political science degree.
“‘Concision is the transcendent goal of all writing’ is a good example of a borrowed belief. Most who advance that belief don’t hold it organically but rather absorbed it as a default wisdom, writers who aren’t confident in their opinions about writing, marinated in a drab professional culture inspired by the fear of looking like an amateur.”
Maybe from Strunk and White? There seem to be a lot of silly zombie rules that it had a hand in promulgating, like “don’t use passive voice”.
The instruction not to use the passive voice is prob mainly from Orwell, right? Politics and the English Language?
In that context, it's pretty powerful, if you look at a government website, or a local council or whatever, or any other official type speak, I guarantee you as soon as you see the passive voice it's hiding some shady bullshit, or concealing information from the public, or being deliberately obscure for some other reason at best.
For fiction or whatever, have at it, use whatever the f you like imo, but the truth is most people use technique accidentally rather than on purpose, so there's a decent chance for many people these generic writing tips are pretty useful.
I see it as learning the scales before you go full Pharoah Sanders.
Yes - it certainly can be used to obfuscate responsibility. "The man's body was penetrated by bullets that had been fired..." etc., even though I think by now this has become such a cliché (at least in the context of police violence) that it no longer really works. But even in these cases, it's still grammatically correct, even if it is poor style.
In experimental science, the passive voice is the default for describing experimental procedures, for example. And in mathematics it's often also the more natural choice, although perhaps less frequently than in experimental science.
Of course it's always valuable and normal in those contexts.
I think a lot of this advice is really 'don't use the passive voice without knowing why'. In the contexts you mention there are obvious reasons for it.
FWIW I work day to day with government in a linguistic job and passivity of language is a major problem. Not necessarily always the passive voice itself, not so much anymore, but sometimes perhaps a piece of information that is meant to tell people how to do a thing which is passive in terms of failing to set out what the organisation must do/will do, and what the reader must do/should do. Like passively failing to commit to 'you'll receive a reply in x weeks' or whatever.
I find language at this level very interesting, like you can see the characteristics and deficiencies of a big organisation play out via the holes in the instructions they send out.
Yeah I do think that 'don't use the passive voice without knowing why' is good advice. My original comment was more about microsoft word highlighting it as a grammatical error.
In general, I don't like the way people write (or speak) these days (yes, I'm a 27yo boomer). I'm always amazed when I see how eloquent people were in TV interviews from the 60s and 70s.
This was also my experience working in government—and I agree so much with your last point— that it's fascinating how much you can actually learn about an agency or org by looking at where its own language gets vague. I often wrote analyses or findings that were subject to review by a very political boss and a lawyer, and the tug of war between the two of them over the copy was often deeply revealing (if unfortunate for my day-to-day happiness, because it took place by proxy of me).
As a college professor teaching public policy, I noticed that students tended to use passive voice when they didn't actually know who was doing or requiring the action in question. And often one of the skills I was trying to emphasize was the ability to decode (from statutes, regulations, legal findings, media coverage of those, etc.) where a given actor's authority came from and what limited it. If the student couldn't identify who was required to do what by whom/what, and was using passive voice to write around that confusion, that was a problem.
Before I worked in government or taught it, I taught comp and rhetoric. I'm not sure what's in pedagogical fashion now, but when I was trained, we were all about genre, and I loved it, because it provided a framework for training students away from blind adherence to arbitrary rules (e.g., no passive voice ever; shorter is better; no first person pronouns) toward observing how people tend to "behave" on the page in a given context, and interrogating why that might be, and then deciding whether or not that "rule" makes sense for the writing one is doing in that particular instance.
A lot of this resounds with my own experience - and the teaching or pieces of advice that start as 'rules' ultimately become just techniques I suppose.
There are exceptions to any rule but I would also say that someone dying is not the same as someone being murdered - the difference between those two things is one is saying something different, not solely that one is passive voice and one is active.
Exactly - and the expanded editions of some of his earlier work (The Stand, for example) are not noticeably better than the shorter versions that his editors forced him to issue back before he was a super star. Anthony Trollope's autobiography reveals a fixation on how much he was paid by the word for his various books. I love his writing but a tiny bit more concision could have improved many of them.
An editor once cut a lot out of a piece a friend and I had written. In arguing with him, I said "But these words are like my children." He replied, "Some of your children aren't very attractive." In that case, he was right - the piece was better shorter. But that's not a universal rule - perhaps the best approach is to use the number of words necessary to say what you want to say.
C. S. Lewis puts it well in Till We Have Faces: "To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean."
I still think Freddie is correct that it depends. The Lord of The Rings didn't become the backbone of modern fantasy by cutting all the unnecessary bits about hobbit holes, Lembas bread, and Tom Bombadil.
Would it have a tighter, more propulsive plot if it had? Probably, and it would be worse for it. In a fantasy epic, readers want to live the world. It's often better in that context to be expansive than a ruthless editor. But you also need to have the prose to keep it engaging.
I'm probably not the one to ask about Tolkien, since I've always vastly preferred the spareness of The Hobbit to the indulgence of The Lord of the Rings, but LOTR is the exception for a lot of reasons:
1. Tolkien already had a massive success with The Hobbit (giving him "permission" to attempt something more ambitious)
2. His publisher insisted on breaking LOTR into three separate books to make it more digestible
3. Even then, it took twenty years before people really caught onto it (and, thanks to piracy, Tolkien didn't see a ton of profit from its success)
None of that makes LOTR bad or wrong, but I do think it illustrates the gamble you're taking by being longer-winded, even if being longer-winded can make the book "better."
I haven't watched them for years, but when it comes to the movies, the extended cuts are arguably better. Still, there were a few scenes that really weren't necessary that were thrown back into the mix. Do we really need to spend time on comedy that doesn't quite land about Merry and Pippin getting high? I guess Peter Jackson couldn't resist.
James Ellroy was famously told to cut one of his works down by half. So, he cut out every word that wasn't necessary to drive the plot, making one of the greatest crime novels of all time.
The dictum, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" is sometimes attributed to Einstein is pretty much on the money in my opinion, and I think something similar applies to concision. But in general, many people find the idea of optimising subject to constraints difficult - in this case, people optimise for concision/brevity/shortness/terseness at the expense of actually making a convincing, reasoned, argument.
A few years ago while suffering some mild grad-school burnout, I undertook some cognitive testing to check for ADD. Part of this test involved performing some relatively straightforward verbal task "as fast as I can, without making any mistakes", which I found to be quite a frustrating set of instructions, since there is a direct trade-off between the two, and since even taking a considerable amount of time would not completely guarantee that I wouldn't make any mistakes, I was quite slow. Oddly enough, the psychologist did not seem to think that the instructions were contradictory - perhaps the interaction revealed more about me than it did about the test.
I keep reading short essays that start to have an argument and then abruptly end and it’s such a missed opportunity most of the time. Also, many people could stand to clarify their thinking.
As Freddy points out, they are often just starting, and probably don't know what they want to say. Or they only have a half formed idea, and it shows in the writing.
One of the things I have found about my own writing is that if I am not fully invested in something, haven't fully thought my way to at least one point, then it is not going to come out in any useful direction. When I have that one point, they other points spring form it organically.
I guess it depends on how the concision was achieved. If it's the result of clarity of thought and expression -- every word doing it job, necessary and sufficient to its consciously considered purpose -- then concision tends to produce better writing. If you're just trying to make it short, by any means necessary -- well, then, welcome to the copy-editing desk, Procrustes; when I said "that piece has legs", I didn't mean . . .
This exactly describes a particular peer of mine who rails against any attempt to communicate with him using non-concise writing. He embodies every stereotype listed here, and misapplies the mantra as stated.
But I’m thankful that he’s helped me pull back on my rambling in casual contexts, at least.
I'm glad to read this. A lot of my favorite books are quite long. There are some things that are short and spare. What comes to mind to me is Sarah Plain and Tall. It fits the story perfectly.
When I'm writing my stories I've wondered about length, but since very few people will ever read them and I'm doing it for fun, it doesn't matter. Sometimes it's the bird walking that makes things interesting.
In essays, I'm often puzzled by the comments about how long something is. JK Rowling wrote an essay explaining her position on women and gender. There was a great howl about how long it was. These great minds of the critics are afraid of 5,000 words? I've also read references to JD Vance's long essay in the Catholic publication. What? Don't you know how to read fluently?
I have avoided Twitter because of doubts that very many people can write anything profound or even interesting in the allotted space.
Twitter is emblematic of our cultural rot. It's baked right in, limiting the discourse by literally counting characters. We needn't ask why The Kids These Days won't consider reading something that's 5,000 words; they've been trained that way very carefully and now can't even read something 5,000 letters long.
I also note this is the shortest piece you've ever written on your Substack.
CHECK AND MATE, MISTER DEBOER.
I think that’s the joke.
This may be your most concise post.
Tl; dr
Spot on, Fred. What began as an invigorating transgression against certain assumptions of modernism has now become an orthodoxy. It actually points to the way in which liberal literary culture and its market have reinforced tendencies which actually limit, not universalize, the range of literary expression— particularly, to use a time honored term, vernacular expression— and a lot of the inconvenient thoughts about the world that are often expressed there.
I once experienced an idiot’s attempt to tell me that tone cannot be expressed through writing…
I was duly shocked, but not surprised. He had previously attempted to lecture and gaslight me about contemporary social justice topics, quite hypocritically, of which I was well aware due to my political science degree.
Agree with you. I remember not a thing about books written by Sally Rooney, but I will never forget 𝑹𝒂𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒔.
“‘Concision is the transcendent goal of all writing’ is a good example of a borrowed belief. Most who advance that belief don’t hold it organically but rather absorbed it as a default wisdom, writers who aren’t confident in their opinions about writing, marinated in a drab professional culture inspired by the fear of looking like an amateur.”
Maybe from Strunk and White? There seem to be a lot of silly zombie rules that it had a hand in promulgating, like “don’t use passive voice”.
I find it so frustrating that certain word processors highlight this is a "grammatical error". The passive voice is often the best option.
The instruction not to use the passive voice is prob mainly from Orwell, right? Politics and the English Language?
In that context, it's pretty powerful, if you look at a government website, or a local council or whatever, or any other official type speak, I guarantee you as soon as you see the passive voice it's hiding some shady bullshit, or concealing information from the public, or being deliberately obscure for some other reason at best.
For fiction or whatever, have at it, use whatever the f you like imo, but the truth is most people use technique accidentally rather than on purpose, so there's a decent chance for many people these generic writing tips are pretty useful.
I see it as learning the scales before you go full Pharoah Sanders.
Yes - it certainly can be used to obfuscate responsibility. "The man's body was penetrated by bullets that had been fired..." etc., even though I think by now this has become such a cliché (at least in the context of police violence) that it no longer really works. But even in these cases, it's still grammatically correct, even if it is poor style.
In experimental science, the passive voice is the default for describing experimental procedures, for example. And in mathematics it's often also the more natural choice, although perhaps less frequently than in experimental science.
Of course it's always valuable and normal in those contexts.
I think a lot of this advice is really 'don't use the passive voice without knowing why'. In the contexts you mention there are obvious reasons for it.
FWIW I work day to day with government in a linguistic job and passivity of language is a major problem. Not necessarily always the passive voice itself, not so much anymore, but sometimes perhaps a piece of information that is meant to tell people how to do a thing which is passive in terms of failing to set out what the organisation must do/will do, and what the reader must do/should do. Like passively failing to commit to 'you'll receive a reply in x weeks' or whatever.
I find language at this level very interesting, like you can see the characteristics and deficiencies of a big organisation play out via the holes in the instructions they send out.
Yeah I do think that 'don't use the passive voice without knowing why' is good advice. My original comment was more about microsoft word highlighting it as a grammatical error.
In general, I don't like the way people write (or speak) these days (yes, I'm a 27yo boomer). I'm always amazed when I see how eloquent people were in TV interviews from the 60s and 70s.
This was also my experience working in government—and I agree so much with your last point— that it's fascinating how much you can actually learn about an agency or org by looking at where its own language gets vague. I often wrote analyses or findings that were subject to review by a very political boss and a lawyer, and the tug of war between the two of them over the copy was often deeply revealing (if unfortunate for my day-to-day happiness, because it took place by proxy of me).
As a college professor teaching public policy, I noticed that students tended to use passive voice when they didn't actually know who was doing or requiring the action in question. And often one of the skills I was trying to emphasize was the ability to decode (from statutes, regulations, legal findings, media coverage of those, etc.) where a given actor's authority came from and what limited it. If the student couldn't identify who was required to do what by whom/what, and was using passive voice to write around that confusion, that was a problem.
Before I worked in government or taught it, I taught comp and rhetoric. I'm not sure what's in pedagogical fashion now, but when I was trained, we were all about genre, and I loved it, because it provided a framework for training students away from blind adherence to arbitrary rules (e.g., no passive voice ever; shorter is better; no first person pronouns) toward observing how people tend to "behave" on the page in a given context, and interrogating why that might be, and then deciding whether or not that "rule" makes sense for the writing one is doing in that particular instance.
A lot of this resounds with my own experience - and the teaching or pieces of advice that start as 'rules' ultimately become just techniques I suppose.
I actually disagree. Just compare “Bob died” to “Bob was murdered” — if the latter is true, then it’s the active voice that’s concealing something.
There are exceptions to any rule but I would also say that someone dying is not the same as someone being murdered - the difference between those two things is one is saying something different, not solely that one is passive voice and one is active.
In one sense, he's right: "mistakes were made" is a "political passive" and should be shunned, but not for its style but for its intent.
Science is also better off now you don't have to say "an experiment was performed".
I just wish anyone that quotes Orwell shows some sign of having read the final rule. That's kind of one of the central messages of the piece.
It's funny how the rationalists all seem to have the exact opposite problem
Haha, I see what you did there. Agree, agree. But try to sell a book over 90k lately? I'm curious if your small press experience was different.
Haha very nice. Now write a long post praising concision.
I was about to make the argument that, while not necessarily better, shorter writing is easier to sell.
And then I remembered Stephen King, hater of brevity, is the best selling author of all time.
Sure, but he built his career on a 60,000-word novella. You can sell long stuff, but usually only if you've earned the right to do so
Exactly - and the expanded editions of some of his earlier work (The Stand, for example) are not noticeably better than the shorter versions that his editors forced him to issue back before he was a super star. Anthony Trollope's autobiography reveals a fixation on how much he was paid by the word for his various books. I love his writing but a tiny bit more concision could have improved many of them.
An editor once cut a lot out of a piece a friend and I had written. In arguing with him, I said "But these words are like my children." He replied, "Some of your children aren't very attractive." In that case, he was right - the piece was better shorter. But that's not a universal rule - perhaps the best approach is to use the number of words necessary to say what you want to say.
C. S. Lewis puts it well in Till We Have Faces: "To say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean."
Of course, that's a lot easier said than done.
I still think Freddie is correct that it depends. The Lord of The Rings didn't become the backbone of modern fantasy by cutting all the unnecessary bits about hobbit holes, Lembas bread, and Tom Bombadil.
Would it have a tighter, more propulsive plot if it had? Probably, and it would be worse for it. In a fantasy epic, readers want to live the world. It's often better in that context to be expansive than a ruthless editor. But you also need to have the prose to keep it engaging.
I'm probably not the one to ask about Tolkien, since I've always vastly preferred the spareness of The Hobbit to the indulgence of The Lord of the Rings, but LOTR is the exception for a lot of reasons:
1. Tolkien already had a massive success with The Hobbit (giving him "permission" to attempt something more ambitious)
2. His publisher insisted on breaking LOTR into three separate books to make it more digestible
3. Even then, it took twenty years before people really caught onto it (and, thanks to piracy, Tolkien didn't see a ton of profit from its success)
None of that makes LOTR bad or wrong, but I do think it illustrates the gamble you're taking by being longer-winded, even if being longer-winded can make the book "better."
I haven't watched them for years, but when it comes to the movies, the extended cuts are arguably better. Still, there were a few scenes that really weren't necessary that were thrown back into the mix. Do we really need to spend time on comedy that doesn't quite land about Merry and Pippin getting high? I guess Peter Jackson couldn't resist.
https://youtu.be/01fpQP1v5ZY?si=6d6vPVnbKXBDtExZ
Another good example is the Kingdom of Heaven Directors Cut, which turned a mediocre movie into a great one.
As much as I'd like to see Liam Neeson's crusader hitting a hookah, it's also probably better for not having an unnecessary stoner scene.
James Ellroy was famously told to cut one of his works down by half. So, he cut out every word that wasn't necessary to drive the plot, making one of the greatest crime novels of all time.
LA Confidential?
yes
Stephen King sells too much to have an editor tell him different. Some people like that, other people don't bother with crap writing.
The dictum, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" is sometimes attributed to Einstein is pretty much on the money in my opinion, and I think something similar applies to concision. But in general, many people find the idea of optimising subject to constraints difficult - in this case, people optimise for concision/brevity/shortness/terseness at the expense of actually making a convincing, reasoned, argument.
A few years ago while suffering some mild grad-school burnout, I undertook some cognitive testing to check for ADD. Part of this test involved performing some relatively straightforward verbal task "as fast as I can, without making any mistakes", which I found to be quite a frustrating set of instructions, since there is a direct trade-off between the two, and since even taking a considerable amount of time would not completely guarantee that I wouldn't make any mistakes, I was quite slow. Oddly enough, the psychologist did not seem to think that the instructions were contradictory - perhaps the interaction revealed more about me than it did about the test.
I keep reading short essays that start to have an argument and then abruptly end and it’s such a missed opportunity most of the time. Also, many people could stand to clarify their thinking.
As Freddy points out, they are often just starting, and probably don't know what they want to say. Or they only have a half formed idea, and it shows in the writing.
One of the things I have found about my own writing is that if I am not fully invested in something, haven't fully thought my way to at least one point, then it is not going to come out in any useful direction. When I have that one point, they other points spring form it organically.
I guess it depends on how the concision was achieved. If it's the result of clarity of thought and expression -- every word doing it job, necessary and sufficient to its consciously considered purpose -- then concision tends to produce better writing. If you're just trying to make it short, by any means necessary -- well, then, welcome to the copy-editing desk, Procrustes; when I said "that piece has legs", I didn't mean . . .
This exactly describes a particular peer of mine who rails against any attempt to communicate with him using non-concise writing. He embodies every stereotype listed here, and misapplies the mantra as stated.
But I’m thankful that he’s helped me pull back on my rambling in casual contexts, at least.
This one made me chuckle
I'm glad to read this. A lot of my favorite books are quite long. There are some things that are short and spare. What comes to mind to me is Sarah Plain and Tall. It fits the story perfectly.
When I'm writing my stories I've wondered about length, but since very few people will ever read them and I'm doing it for fun, it doesn't matter. Sometimes it's the bird walking that makes things interesting.
In essays, I'm often puzzled by the comments about how long something is. JK Rowling wrote an essay explaining her position on women and gender. There was a great howl about how long it was. These great minds of the critics are afraid of 5,000 words? I've also read references to JD Vance's long essay in the Catholic publication. What? Don't you know how to read fluently?
I have avoided Twitter because of doubts that very many people can write anything profound or even interesting in the allotted space.
Twitter is emblematic of our cultural rot. It's baked right in, limiting the discourse by literally counting characters. We needn't ask why The Kids These Days won't consider reading something that's 5,000 words; they've been trained that way very carefully and now can't even read something 5,000 letters long.