I have often times marveled at people that were able to say exactly what they wanted in very few words.
Being able to say exactly what you wanted to say, and well, in a concise manner seems to correlate with good writers and people that were sharper than average.
Looking at some of my previous posts, and how long it takes me to get to a point, with long meandering phrasings like you are reading right now seems to suggest the opposite.
So I have come to a terrible conclusion if I am right, I am borderline retarded. But for the larger point, is being concise mostly a measure of intellect and good writing skills, mostly practice, or some combination of both? Or perhaps something else like latching onto certain style that were more to the point.
I suspect it’s more this than anything. I think some environments, perhaps military and business for example, often lend themselves to more succinct writing while writers in academia and government tend to be more verbose.
Warning: I may be biased because a 200+ page RFP from a major city just got dropped on me, with a response due Friday :smack:
I have recently taken up writing as a hobby. Working on my first and most likely last novel. I struggle endlessly with trying to limit my words. I end up with incomplete thoughts and find myself redoing everything I write numerous times.
No, because some thoughts or points are inherently simple and can be expressed concisely, while others are not. A piece of writing like a post or a letter can be lengthy for many different reasons: for instance, because the writer wants to be comprehensive and cover all the facts, or alternatively, because the writer is a witless dumbass incapable of either critical thinking or coherent writing.
Good writing is mainly characterized by being easy to read and understand, and the points are clear and well expressed. This is, after all, the fundamental purpose of language. Bad writing tends to be incoherent, and very often worsened by being riddled with language errors of all kinds, all of which requires the reader to marshal extra effort to try to understand the mess. It has nothing to do with length. A message should be just as long as it needs to be. It’s good writing if it’s considerate of the reader and makes his job as easy as possible instead of making him slog through incomprehensible gibberish.
I’m going to guess that the military and business can also be less than succinct. I remember reading Isaac Asimov, possibly in one of his autobiographies, as he explained how difficult he found it to write reports that had to be accepted by the military. He and the other chemists had been given a handbook of how to write reports by the military, with explanations on footnotes and glossaries and other things.
After weeks of arguing, he decided to show how pointless the handbook was. He took a very simple report and found a way to shoehorn every last method in the handbook into it. To his mind, it became all but unreadable. They loved it. They kept it as an example for other chemists struggling to use the handbook. He gave up.
Hmm. I think editing has a lot more to do with it. But it is true that a person can improve their writing by doing a lot of it, while reading a lot as well.
One side suggestion for you to consider as you go about judging another piece of writing: some people can SEEM to be “sharp,” simply because they have confidence, borne of a marriage of ego and ignorance.
There’s certainly the old saw “I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
IOW, it’s diligent thought and careful editing that produces clear concise results.
So long-windedness may simply be a matter of not bothering to edit. It’s also the case that styles change over time. Good 1920s writing seems very flowery and indirect. Points are hinted towards, not made. Good 1950s writing is more like good 2017 writing, but is still a lot less direct than today’s favored style.
Punchline: short=good, long=bad is simplistic and stupid.
Quality writing is pitched at the correct knowledge level for the audience. It supplies the right amount of context; not too much; not too little. It’s sufficiently detailed, but no more detailed than that. It’s carefully edited.
All of those things takes brains. Skipping any of those areas is lazy. Lazy might be dumb. But it doesn’t have to be.
I don’t think verbosity indicates a lower intelligence, but I do run across some writings where it is apparent* the writer is using “big words” that they don’t quite understand in an attempt to appear more intelligent/better educated than they actually are. When I run into it, I am reminded of the adventures of the Duke and Dauphin in the *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
*
As a writer, I know what it is to fall in love with one’s own prose. That is where one’s editor earns their money (or even just friends helping with proofreading.)
I do think that some students and even professionals mistakenly believe that writing opaquely gives an impression of greater knowledge. Many learn the value of writing with clarity and less filler as they mature and have more ideas of value to actually express. Yes, as stated above, with as many words as needed to clearly communicate and no more.
There is also playing to the target audience. The best communicators can write with one level of within field vocabulary and depth of explanations for peers and also express the same basic concepts in terms someone of lower reading skill and no specialty knowledge can understand. Those are, in general, skills that are learned by practice with intent, not a sign of innate intelligence per se.
I tend to put everything down on the page and then start carving out.
Back in Journalism school, a required course had us write a 10-page report. Then we had to cut it to 5 pages. Then we had to cut it to 3. It has taken years of practice to achieve cutting out all the garbage before I write it down, and I still don’t succeed often.
Some basics that work for me:
Never use a fancy word when a simple one will do.
Know thy audience. If you have a scattered audience, focus on the largest identifiers (e.g., male, over age 40, craftsmen).
Use active voice and cut out excess adjectives and adverbs. See how much you can pare down a sentence and still get the idea across.
Give yourself time to craft a good sentence. Write everything and then organize it. With scissors if necessary.
Maybe communication isn’t one of your better skills but with practice, it will improve. It is rare when I can sit down and whip out the exact communication I need. And I write for a living.
Mere verbosity is not enough to determine anything. There are unintelligent sounding speakings styles that are quite verbose, yes. But there are others that are quite terse.
If anything, I’d argue a slight tendency the other way. Complex writing tends to be more verbose, and people who write in complex ways generally think in them, too. They are used to thinking that way, and have to expend more effort to make sure what they are saying isn’t too complex.
But the effect has to be small, if it exists at all. There are too many intelligent people who can convey things succinctly. There’s a correlation with faster thinking times, which would mean it would take less time to edit one’s thoughts to be less complex.
Plus there are people whose complexity of writing is only due to thoughts not being well connected. We’ve all known those types of people, who you spend forever trying to understand, but turns out they aren’t saying anything all that special.