Brevity, Clarity, Content

We’ll meet together more than two dozen times, and every time I will share a writing tip I think is essential, but you can absorb half of what I have to offer by adopting the mantra: Brevity, Clarity, Content.

Songwriters may be the best writers of all. They certainly are experts at condensing complex ideas and expressions of emotional states to their merest essence. And holding our attention just long enough to pass the knowledge nugget. And making it rhyme!

For most of your assignments, particularly the component arguments of your Researched Persuasive Paper, you’ll be working against the confines of a word count: 1000 words for the short papers; 3000 words for the final result.

Those limits are meant to restrain you from wasteful, wordy expressions of your massive, unruly collection of brilliant observations. They’re not a command to WRITE MORE WORDS. They’re a warning to USE FEWER WORDS to communicate the abundance of your understanding.

If you get to the end of your research and have to pad your knowledge with boilerplate, repetition, throat-clearing introductions, self-congratulatory encores, then you haven’t learned enough. Your research is thin. You’ve failed.

Nobody else will have spent 10 or 12 weeks investigating your unique angle on reality. They’ve been busy with their own distractions. It was your job to scour academia for evidence one way or the other about a wild conjecture you yourself posed to the world. You’re the one who learned something worth sharing. And your readers will give you about two minutes to prove it.

If you waste the first two minutes, you lose. They lose. Communication does not occur. They move on to learn something else from somebody who does the job better. Or they watch a cat video and never know what they missed. And it’ll be your fault.

Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child“

Here’s a verse from the song:

Rich relations give
Crust of bread and such
You can help yourself
But don’t take too much
Mama may have, Papa may have,
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

35 words that express what?

—Families are not associations of equals with comparable advantages.
—Wealthier family members may occasionally, if they’re feeling generous, contribute tokens of largesse to their less-well-off relations.
—What they offer is not a full meal, not even a full loaf of bread, but the scraps from the kitchen, or the table, that they themselves don’t value.
—With open arms and grand gestures, they welcome their disadvantaged relatives to take whatever leftovers they can carry after the well-fed have gorged themselves.
—But even that “generosity” is limited.
—The amount taken is being observed, and judged.
—Someone—not the needy relative—places a limit on how much should be taken of the castoffs from the wealthy table.
—When that amount of “charity,” if crusts of bread can be called charitable, is exceeded, the rich relations deem it “too much.”

To this reader, that is the content of the first 16 words. After that:

—You have what you have and nothing else.
—Other people’s wealth, even your parents’ wealth, does not make you less poor.
—You are blessed ONLY by whatever you personally control.
—Nothing that you think you might be entitled to by way of familial relations is of any value.
—If you have, you’re blessed.
—If you’re counting on others, you’re screwed.

I’m not exaggerating.
The lyric is 35 words.
My explanation is 200 words.

Billie Holiday was given, and didn’t squander, and somehow managed to express, her peculiar genius here by condensing hundreds of words of mediocre text into 35 words of timeless fantasticality.

You may not be a genius. I clearly am not.

But we have to judge ourselves against genius because genius is the goal, unattainable for 99.999% of us, but still the standard that sets the 100% at 100%.

Get as close as you can. I’ll celebrate every step of the journey that gets you closer.