From the course: College Prep: Writing a Strong Essay

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Saying a lot with a few words

Saying a lot with a few words

From the course: College Prep: Writing a Strong Essay

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Saying a lot with a few words

- Even professional writers struggle with being concise. George Orwell, novelist, best known for Animal Farm and 1984 once said: "If it's possible to cut a word out, cut it out." Wordiness obscures clarity and forces a reader to sift through a sentence for what's important. Strunk and White also address this challenge in the Elements of Style, which by the way, is a wonderful little book that everyone should own. Here's what they have to say. "Vigorous writing is concise. "A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, "a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, "for the same reason that a drawing "should have no unnecessary lines "and a machine no unnecessary parts." Every word in your sentence needs to pull its weight. Every sentence in your paragraph must contribute to your purpose. Let's take a look at an example of how this works at the sentence level. This sentence contains 23 words. "In this video is an illustration of the use "of the concepts of concise style "in the writing of a…

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