so what's a "needful word," anyway?

[truepenny]

Strunk & White's most famous and most quoted piece of advice is: Omit needless words. White, in his introduction, describes Strunk's delivery of it:

When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and, in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, "Rule Seventeen: Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!"
(xiii)

Notice the repetition (a characteristic, White says, of Strunk's oratorical style.) Consider the tension that repetition creates.

Many people, especially those getting it second-hand, assume this maxim is intended to privilege conciseness and brevity. But it isn't. Listen:

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish in the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other.
(69)

In defining style--or trying to, since it's an imponderable, like the Zen koans Bear is talking about this morning--they quote both Faulkner and Hemingway:

He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course.

Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besideds there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited.

Anyone acquainted with Faulkner and Hemingway [say Mssrs. Strunk & White] will have recognized them in these passages and perceived which was which. How different are their languours!
68)

Their purpose is not to praise Hemingway at the expense of Faulkner, or to castigate either one of them for using "needless words," but to point out the individuality of their styles.

So Omit needless words isn't trying to make you write like Hemingway. Thank god. It's trying to make you think about the words you use. Encouraging you to get rid of the scaffolding.

Now, Strunk & White have strong and definite opinions about what the scaffolding consists of. You don't have to agree with them. (That's the big secret: you don't have to agree with anyone who gives you writing advice. You have to listen to it, evaluate it, and decide if it's true for you or not. It may not be. That's okay.) They advocate a plain and unadorned writing style--and since their advice is intended for beginning writers and college students, I think that's sensible. And Strunk's style is peremptory and authoritarian (a style White says he chose not to meddle with). Which makes it a little harder to plant your feet and say, No, when he tells you how you ought to write.

But do it anyway. Don't let yourself be bullied.

Omit needless words is a dictum, a fiat. Rule Seventeen: Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words! is a koan. The koan is more useful in the long run.

---
WORKS CITED
Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3rd Edition. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1979.

Comments

[zschechfan.livejournal.com]

I appreciated this :-).

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, because the rule-zombie newbie, upon learning the rule "Omit needless words" and seeing the phrase "Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!" will slash the last two repetitions, not understanding that they are, in fact, needed. Not to convey information (the first pass does that well enough on its own) but to convey the urgency and imperitive. As well as illustrate the very ellusiveness of the concept. :-)

[elisem.livejournal.com]

*expression of wordless delight*
*vigorous nodding*

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

What do y'all mean by "scaffolding"? I haven't heard people speak of removing it before. I'm afraid of heights, so I never go up on scaffolding. If it's in my prose, I've never climbed it. (*grin*)

I agree with changing "pickup truck" to "pickup" in most contexts, taking out "that" when the sense is fine without it, and removing "at this point in time" from any text (and stomping it, then setting the shards afire). However, typically the critique groups I go to want me to take out every word. They do love them some o'that no-style style. Then they say they want me to explain everything immediately when I introduce it. (I'll write, "She needed to buy a card for Tinky, too." Then they want me to give Tinky's entire bio and description IMMEDIATELY. I try to explain that this is raising a story question ["Who is Tinky?"} and is supposed to be something they wait to find out, but they don't understand that. This leads to a good number of front-loaded openings among those group members.

Anyway, the cut-all-modifiers approach can't be what you and Elizabeth Bear and others are discussing.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Honestly? I think you need a new critique group.

---

"Scaffolding" is Bear's term, afaik original to her. Scaffolding is the words you use to shore up your meaning, because you lack confidence in what you're saying, or you want to leave yourself safely hidden. Writing is about putting yourself on the line, about being wrong at the top of your voice if you're going to be wrong, and scaffolding is a defense mechanism to try and hedge your bets. It's the cloud of ink a squid emits to protect itself. But unlike that cloud of ink, it doesn't offer any real protection; it just creates bad writing.

It's hard to define, because the exact details will vary from writer to writer. I use the word "clearly" too much--for example--as if I need to persuade the reader that, no, really, it is clear.

I don't know if that will help. I hope it does.