7.2 Clarity and Concision

Clear and concise writing is best achieved by separating drafting from revision. Strong writers often produce messy, repetitive, or overly wordy first drafts, and that’s a normal and productive part of the process. Writing ideas multiple ways can help refine your thinking and strengthen your argument. A rough first draft isn’t a failure; it’s a necessary step toward clear and effective writing.

As that thinking becomes clearer, your thesis and organization solidify, and many sentence-level issues begin to resolve on their own. It’s easier to write effective sentences when their purpose is defined. While you’ll still need to edit for clarity, concision, and mechanics, strong underlying thinking makes revision more manageable. A helpful way to think about editing is as the final adjustment that brings your writing into focus.

Concision is the opposite of wordiness. Concise writing is tight and bright; it is clear and content rich. In other words, it contains no additional fluff or unnecessary words and every word and sentence should be doing some significant work for the paper as a whole.

In the worst cases, wordiness leads to whole paragraphs of fluff and repetition. Sometimes this happens when students are asked to meet a page-length requirement for an assignment. “How can I possibly write five to six pages about this topic?” you may wonder. That’s a great question and one you could work on with your instructor—but the answer should ultimately boil down to better content, not fluff paragraphs. A few quick ideas to do that would be to add a counterargument, bring in another source, give an example, ask a more complex question, etc.

Fluff happens for a lot of reasons. Of course, reaching a word or page count is the most common motivation. Here are a few ways and reasons fluff can happen in writing:

Of course, there’s a fine line between detail and fluff. Avoiding fluff doesn’t mean always using the fewest words possible. Instead, you should occasionally ask yourself in the revision and editing process, How is this part contributing to the whole? Is this somehow building toward a bigger purpose? If the answer is no, then you need to edit.

Conciseness is an ongoing exercise for all writers. Here are a few tips to make your writing more concise:

• Remove unnecessary repetition. For example, a “slow, unhurried, leisurely stroll” could be rewritten as simply “a leisurely stroll.”
• Remove empty modifiers. Adjectives and adverbs that don’t significantly contribute to the meaning of the sentence and are used only to intensify the word they are modifying. The most common ones are very, really, pretty, totally, and just.
• Use an active voice when it makes sense to do so.
• Combine sentences to avoid repetition. For example, this version is wordy: “I went to the store. The store was Winco. They were closed.” A more concise version would be “I went to Winco, but they were closed.” Notice that concise writing does not always mean short, simple sentences.
• Avoid “academese” in your writing. It is an effort to write in an ornamented and “scholarly” way.
• Avoid “I think” and “it may seem” statements. This weakens your argument when you are trying to sound academic and/ or authoritative. Instead, use strong language.

Michael Harvey notes that fluffy, wordy prose does not necessarily result from an underdeveloped writing process. Sometimes it reflects the context of academic writing: “[M]any of us are afraid of writing concisely because doing so can make us feel exposed. Concision leaves us fewer words to hide behind. Our insights and ideas might appear puny stripped of those inessential words, phrases, and sentences in which we rough them out. We might even wonder, were we to cut out the fat, would anything be left? It’s no wonder, then, that many students make little attempt to be concise—and may, in fact, go out of their way not to be…”