One of the most common complaints from students approaching the end of a piece of written work is that they simply can’t do justice to the question within the permitted word limit. This is as true for 10,000 word dissertations as for short assignments of less than a 1,000 words. Yet whenever I read through students’ work it is rare to find examples in which the word count could not be significantly reduced simply by tightening up overwritten phrasing. It is also usually the case that far from reducing the impact of the work, removing words often provides for a much clearer argument.
This is not something which is peculiar to academic writing, although students and academics are perhaps more guilty than most. Government ministers are required to read and digest a large number of official reports often on complex issues, but understandably favour clarity and brevity over lengthy verbosity. Perhaps the most famous appeal for brevity in official reports was made by Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in 1940 when he wrote the following short memo for his civil servants appealing for an end to ‘officialese jargon’. Churchill was fighting a war and clearly pressed for time, but there is much we can all learn from his advice:
