The Long and Short of It

by Mary Jackson (October 2008)  

 

“I am sorry this is so long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

 

This apology is attributed by turns to such fine minds as Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and even Marie Curie. Between them they must have a point. Here are some brief thoughts on length:

 

If any man will draw up his case, and put his name at the foot of the first page, I will give him an immediate reply.  Where he compels me to turn over the sheet, he must wait my leisure.  ~Lord Sandwich

 

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.  ~Thomas Jefferson

 

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.  ~William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style, 1918

 

If you bring that sentence in for a fitting, I can have it shortened by Wednesday.  ~M*A*S*H, Hawkeye, “The Gun”

 

Brevity is the soul of lingerie.  ~Dorothy Parker

 

Parker’s briefs aside, the consensus seems to be that short is good. But is it? What, in any case, do we mean by short? The writers and speakers quoted above do not mean quite the same thing.

 

Lord Sandwich appears to have been a busy man. He had no time for a full lunch, or to read a lengthy brief, if such is not a contradiction in terms. One page had to suffice, even if the matter required more than one page to do it justice. When Lord Sandwich praised brevity, he was pleading time constraints.

 

Thomas Jefferson does not praise brevity tout court:  he qualifies his statement. Two words should not be used “when one will do”; by implication one word will not always do. Brevity is a means to clarity.

 

For William Strunk Jr., brevity appears bleakly utilitarian. We must purge our writing of “unnecessary” paragraphs, sentences and words and become a lean, mean writing machine. Brevity, in the context here of a stylebook, is a discipline and a corrective to excess.

 

Hawkeye, in the comedy M*A*S*H, has clearly heard a convoluted sentence that he cannot understand, and he suspects that he is not meant to understand it. Brevity, for Hawkeye, is a corrective to pomposity.

 

Brevity, then, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And it is not always a good thing. 

Theodore Dalrymple writes a regular half-page article in The Spectator. The short pieces are always entertaining and informative, but sometimes they shade into caricature, for example here:

Whenever I return to England from abroad, which is often, a very troubling question comes insistently into mind: why are the people here so ugly?

I do not mean by this that I think all foreigners are handsome or beautiful, far from it. One of the tricks that Stepmother Nature has played on humanity is to give it an idea of beauty in its own kind, and then deny the thing itself to so large a proportion of the race.

 

And so he goes on, without really saying who is meant, or how he knows all about them. Similarly, in this column, he revels in the “quite transcendent vulgarity” of a stranger:

Was he? Perhaps, but the case is not made, and cannot be made in the mere five hundred words dictated by the space allowed. Dalrymple is an excellent essayist who combines moral and verbal clarity, but he generally needs space to develop his arguments. His thoughts are too big to squeeze into half a page.

Five hundred words is not enough for Dalrymple, but it is more than enough for many journalists and “public intellectuals”, and for quite a few novelists. Such writers generally use a lot of words to say very little. Homi K. Bhabha, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, uses fifty-five words to say nothing at all:

A Professor of English, it seems, may collate words in any way he sees fit. Mere meaning is for the layman, the ordinary reader, who wishes to understand, or – heaven forbid – to be entertained.

A few months ago, The Times challenged six authors to “put a modern spin” on the theme of love. This sounds easy, until you learn that they had a limit of three hundred words. The best entry by far was “Romeo and Romeo” by Lionel Shriver, which, since it is only three hundred words, I reproduce in full:

Romney came of age thinking Bad Thoughts, and led a secret life with other boys. The badness made him feel guilty, but it was also exciting. So in a way the badness was good.

She and Jules got on great, which was annoying.

Jules went bald. Deprived of the goodness of badness, they developed erectile dysfunction issues. After seven tedious years, they split.

Alack, alack! Methinks Romney and Jules might have made a fabulous tragedy, if only someone had tried to keep them apart.

Whatever else went wrong, the length is perfect. The piece could not be wished longer or shorter. Any shorter and it would sound clipped or rushed. Any longer would be superfluous padding. Indeed it is very difficult to imagine the piece being longer or shorter, a sure sign that the writer has done his work. Contrast this entertaining and not unserious story with the passage by Homi K. Bhabha quoted above. The latter could drop a sentence or add a hundred sentences without any loss of quality.

Anita Brookner, Maggie O’Farrell and countless others.

This Amazon reviewer suggests not:

Rule 1: Always leave them wanting more.

 

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Mary Jackson contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome.