Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Margy Thomas's avatar

This prompt reminds me of an undergrad course I took a hundred years ago, “Advanced Expository Writing.” Dr. Losano would spend the whole 3-hour meetings pruning, scraping, and crushing every last unnecessary word out of our writing. To this day I tend to hyperverbosity (Herman Melville is to me as Henry James is to you, Jim), but when the spirit of Dr. Losano comes and whispers in my ear that I lose points for every word that can be cut without changing the meaning, it reminds me to condense. It’s no easier to do today than it was two decades ago, though! 🥲 Going to work on this prompt today and come back later to share my “tweet”! 🐦

Expand full comment
Helen Sword's avatar

I tried writing a Twitter-length summary and it came out as a haiku -- which is much more my natural medium, I guess. In fact, when I was working on my book Writing with Pleasure, I wrote the Story-Argument of the entire book as a haiku, and then went on to write a haiku for every chapter, plus the intro and conclusion. A great way to get to the nub of what you're trying to convey!

Expand full comment
48 more comments...

No posts