Style Isn’t Just About Economy In Language
Conciseness is among the qualities that efficient writers are able to endow their writing with. Talking about a subject as simply as possible using the fewest words will always be regarded as the ideal way to write. In more than a few instances, though, minimizing isn’t the only valid concern: you need to write in a style that works for the subject and the type of writing you’re doing.
The best example of conciseness is the news story. Using an inverted pyramid format, it dispenses of all the main talking points quickly, then spends the rest of the piece filling in the details. All throughout, sentences and paragraphs are kept short to make reading effortless, with all pertinent information easily found within the text.
As you can tell, not all prose will work best when written like a news story. Hence, the need to write in a certain style, telling the story or discussing the subject in a way that’s on point.
A detective novel, for instance, often gets written with a hard-edged style, just as a human interest piece will frequently be covered with a compassionate tone. In both of those cases, the writers consciously adopted a style — one that they felt will be a proper fit for the piece.
Any style you adopt will suffer without economy of language. Unless, of course, you’re intentionally setting out to write overwrought, excessively wordy and convoluted prose. That’s why it’s important to work on both, along with the clarity and correctness of your language, to achieve the best results with your writing tasks.