- Susan Weiner Investment Writing

Bryan Garner offers four tips for trimming extra words in his chapter “Waste no Words” in his HBR Guide to Better Business Writing.

They include, when possible:

Deleting prepositions
Replacing nouns ending with -ion with verbs
Replacing forms of the verb “to be” with stronger verbs, as I discuss in The “Be” test for writers and Test your financial editing skill with these examples
Eliminating “padding” such as “in this connection it might be observed that”

For examples of how to trim extra words, see my posts on Word and phrase substitutions for economical writers and More substitutions for economical writers.

Disclosure: If you click on the Amazon link in this post and then buy something, I will receive a small commission. I link only to books in which I find some value for my blog’s readers.

The image in the upper left is courtesy of Biswarup Ganguly [CC BY 3.0]

“Brevity without substance is useless.” This statement in Bryan Garner’s HBR Guide to Better Business Writing spoke to me.

If you regularly read this blog, you know I’m a big fan of writing concisely, and observing the rule of 42-14-2. However, sometimes a longer sentence is easier to understand than a shorter sentence. And, a paragraph may be easier to understand than a single sentence.

Garner sums up your goal as follows; “Provide only the information the reader needs to understand the issue—no more and no less.”

Disclosure: If you click on the Amazon link in this post and then buy something, I will receive a small commission. I link only to books in which I find some value for my blog’s readers.

The image in the upper left is courtesy of Nick Youngson [CC BY-SA 3.0]

Tag Archive for: writing briefly

4 tips for trimming extra words

No brevity without substance, please