How I Learned to Write Less

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

“J’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” (Translation: “I made this one longer only because I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”) — Blaise Pascal

This quote, or versions thereof, has been variously attributed to Cicero, Winston Churchill, Voltaire, and Bill Clinton. According to Quote Investigator, it was in fact the French polymath Blaise Pascal who penned these words in a letter published in 1657. Granted, others have echoed the sentiment in other missives, so it’s highly likely that all these people and others have expressed this idea in one form or another.

As a writer by trade, I wholeheartedly agree with this notion that writing less is harder — and more time-consuming — than writing more. It’s also a skill that I’ve slowly gotten better at over the decades through countless efforts to strip content to its bare essentials.

When I think back to my most formative teachers in my journey towards becoming a professional writer, three names come to mind. First, there was Mr. Syme, my grade 11 and 12 English teacher, who saw something outstanding in my creative writing and let me know in no uncertain terms. Secondly, there was Mme. McFarland, my French teacher in the same grades, who gave me confidence in my ability to write in my country’s other official language — something in which I take pride to this day.

The third and probably most formative was the great Dr. Roderick Barman of the University of British Columbia History Department, who I had the privilege of studying under as a history graduate student. An expert on the history of imperial period Brazil, Dr. Barman is a true writer’s historian and was an uncompromising taskmaster as an instructor — and exactly what I needed at the time.

As a grad student, I wrote a lot. Not only was a churning out papers, but I was also writing for student newspapers, mostly as a music reviewer, producing essayistic articles on punk rock and experimental jazz. When I look back at the stuff I wrote in my early twenties, it was all very enthusiastic but rather long-winded. I still had an undergrad mindset of more writing being better and had yet to learn the virtue of parsimony in writing.

Dr. Barman changed all that. In our first class together, he assigned us a ten-page paper while warning us that if we went a single word over ten pages, he would give us a zero. I can’t remember what the topic was, but I did it, using up all ten allotted pages, and handed it in.

I can’t remember how I did on this paper, but I’ll always remember the next assignment, which was to rewrite the exact same paper in no more than five pages — again with the same admonishment not to go over this page limit. He also gave us the instruction that not a single detail of the original paper could be left out. It all had to fit into five pages.

(Of course, these days ChatGPT could do the trick in seconds. At the time, I had no such tool at my disposal.)

I handed the paper in. The next assignment was to write the same paper in no more than two pages, again with all the information intact. And as you might have guessed, the final assignment was a single-page summary of every single point made in the original ten-page pager. This, he asserted once we had all handed in our final assignment, was the way one should approach writing a research proposal — find the most word-pinching way to get the most information possible into as short a format as possible.

I took this lesson to heart and to this day I pride myself on being an efficient user of words. As our communications world has become social media-ized and our collective attention span has been reduced to that of a three-month-old golden retriever, short, concise content is the order of the day. Dr. Barman’s lessons on word economy helped me greatly as I transition to the role of social media coordinator, especially when Twitter had a 120-character cap. From a professional standpoint, it’s the most useful lesson I ever received.

I often get asked by work colleagues, especially those with kids approaching university age, what major I recommend from the point of view of becoming a skilled writer/communicator. While I’m biased toward my old major of history, I’m essentially agnostic on the subject. It’s true that history is rooted in storytelling, which is conducive to readable content, there are great writers from all academic disciplines. Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, and David Suzuki are all gifted wordsmiths — all from the sciences. J.G. Ballard began his writing career as a medical student. Ursula K. LeGuin majored in French, while Margaret Atwood and Stephen King took the more traditional approach of English lit. There’s no rule.

That said, we all need our own version of Dr. Barman in our life — somebody who’s going to dismantle our writing and help us cut out all the extraneous crap. For some of us, this might come in the form of AI. While I do worry that tools like Chat are going to erode the next generation’s ability to write independently, I think there’s also a chance that this tool will improve the craft overall by serving as an instruction manual on how to be maximally concise. I think that’s possible.

Personally, I think blogging and social media have been a positive boon to the writing craft. Concise, uncluttered content is king in a world of microblogging and search engine optimization. This combined with a growing awareness of neurodiversity and priority placed on online accessibility has resulted in a welcome less-is-more attitude to writing. I’ve even seen it in my recent evolution as a writer, as my output continues to become more concise. Even my poetry has become less wordy, more digital-friendly than it once was.

That’s not to say there’s not a lot wrong with our information ecosystem at present — especially social media. Our attention spans have been massively eroded. Even I have trouble committing to reading long books cover to cover these days. I’m very fussy about what I read, as I find so many authors to be far too florid for my tastes. (Apologies to Salman Rushdie; I know you’re a literary great, but I just can’t deal with all that flowery language!) I wish I had more patience as a reader; I just don’t.

I prefer to focus on the positives of our digital revolution, on the fact that the prioritization of conciseness has been a great equalizer in the delivery of information. I really hope that the current AI revolution also benefits us as a culture of writers. I think it’s all up to today’s teachers and how they guide young minds in the usage of this technology. As a teaching tool for structure and word economy, it’s unprecedented, but it’s going to take inspired teachers like Mr. Syme, Mme. McFarland, and Dr. Barman to instill a love of writing and a desire to use this technology as an instructor rather than as a crutch.

Writing should be fun. Specifically, writing concisely should be viewed as a game, a sort of word Tetris to see how compactly language can be used. At least that’s how I look at it. And while this website exists primarily to encourage people to hire me as their go-to writer, I sincerely hope everyone reading this finds enjoyment in their own writing process and takes something away from this.

Literacy is awesome! And a privilege. And concise writing is, in literacy terms, a great equalizer. We’ve come a long way from the days when reading and writing was the exclusive privilege of a learned caste of priests and scribes. And we all have a role to play in amplifying these gains further still so that reading is accessible to everyone.