A column on writing from Editor & Publisher February 14, 1981.

Tight Editing

Cut the babble & gain 10%

Lush, leisurely writing was once prized. Today we pan any wordy style as florid. Since Hemmingway, terse is terrific. Terse can also be curt, choppy and graceless, but on newspapers conciseness is preferred for reasons beyond style.

Editing tightly is like finding a forest in the newsroom. On a wordy paper, many locally-written stories can be reduced to 20 percent, which means the newsroom could gain a 10 percent larger newshole (if half the paper is fixed space -- wire, comics, columns, editorials and such). One extra page means better sports coverage, better financial coverage, more features that feature beautiful writing. With newsprint nudging $500 a ton, should a tight editor be worth less than a tight end?

Tight copy editors everywhere are saving big chunks of space by combining similar stories under heads like Around the Region, Graduates, People In the News, Basketball Scoreboard. These gather the bulletin board stories into lists of sentences or columns of short paragraphs. Readers still tuck them into scrapbooks; a few words here are as good as a few paragraphs.

Tight editing out to begin with reporters. "Omit needless words!" cries Professor Strunk in Elements of Style. but how? If we could, wouldn't we? When we don't, we couldn't. the hardest thing in writing has got to be trying to improve your own stuff as you write it. On rereading this column in three months, I will come to it as a stranger and find the dozen places to smooth it that you have already tripped over. Writing against a daily deadline means you cringe when you see it in print.

Strunk offers a good but small list of common clutter. Sharidan Baker has a more helpful chapter ("Correcting wordy sentences" in his lucid Practical Stylist). Here are the top five items of my own do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do checklist.

• >Watch for clusters of prepositions. They often sprout clumps of weedy words. With the exception of Except for getting rid of empty passives, nothing trims your style in short order with little effort on your part so fast as the the clipping of this crabgrass on the otherwise flawless lawn of your writing these phrases.
• Check out every passive voice. The passive has been much maligned, but it has many vital uses. You may not know the doer of the deed. (A man was robbed this morning...) or you may know who robbed him but not want to tell. In straight description or narration, however, which is mostly what we write, the passive is often boring, sometimes muddy and always a little wordy. We slip into it too easily, particular with rewriting releases written in legalese.
   
  OK: The wordy passive voice is loved by beginning writers.
  BETTER: Beginning writers love the wordy passive voice.
• Get rid of nearly ever It/This/That/There/who/which & be. Writers, who are eager but unedited, will see that it is their sentences that spring to life.
• Read your words aloud. What you don't spot visually you often catch aurally.
• For a tight ending, end cleanly. How much can you chop off the finish? Don't sputter out, repeating what you have said twice before, reiterating the main point in similar word, hammering home the theme one more time.