Everyday Writer - Bedford, Freeman & Worth College Publishing ...

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28
Conciseness
Austen does more without words than most writers do with
them. – PATRICIA T. O’CONNER
To demonstrate that being concise may not always be preferable, compare
the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to
the following revision, created by someone using the software program
Workbench, a style and diction checker. Read both versions aloud, and
then encourage the class to decide which makes the more effective opening
for the novel.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the
spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we
had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going
direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period,
that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. – CHARLES DICKENS
The times were the best and worst, wise and foolish. The era was one of belief
and disbelief, light and darkness, hope and despair. Before us lay everything and
nothing. We were all going direct to heaven or straight to hell. The period was so
much like today that its loudest critics could describe it only in superlatives.
–WORKBENCH
He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
–ABRAHAM LINCOLN
FOR COLLABORATION: Eliminate Unnecessary, Redundant,
and Empty Words (28a–c)
Ask students to work in small groups to read over the excerpt of Emily
Lesk’s essay in 10a of The Everyday Writer (or have them access the
entire paper on the book companion Web site, under Student Writing