'It Is Too Long'

Each year we publish an engineering magazine. Its tone tempers boasting with an effort to be scientifically rigorous. The intended audience is absurdly broad – alumni, deans of other engineering schools, students and prospective students, and anyone with ten minutes to kill. I imagine it being read by desperate patients in dentists’ waiting rooms. I write most of the contents and edit all of it. This year the magazine is forty-eight pages long and we are in the final proof-reading stage. The staff is impatient to get it to the printer – probably on Friday – but editing, even more than writing, is the facet of my personality that is legitimately obsessive-compulsive. It's a curse. I edit, mentally, the list of ingredients on a jar of salsa. 

 

As a newspaper reporter I learned – reluctantly, at first, then enthusiastically – that any copy can be revised and made better, usually by chopping. Excising even a single word can improve a sentence. Weigh the little darlings carefully, then wield your cleaver. So that’s what I’ve been doing – editing text I have already edited three or four times, and still finding words to remove. My mantra has been a brief sentence written by Jules Renard (1864-1910) in his journal for October 1898: “One could say of almost all literature that it is too long.”

 

I understand that writing about human leukocyte antigens is hardly literature, but the observation stands. Bad writers customarily favor quantity over quality. This may be particularly true for American writers. We might think of it as the Texas syndrome. My own tastes have shifted significantly over the decades. I favor epigram over epic, essay over treatise, short fiction over long. This is not out of laziness or intimidation. I would never suggest Tolstoy or Proust even omit a syllable, but in general the literary sprinter has it all over the marathon man. Padding, fluff and flab help no one.   

 

[See The Journal of Jules Renard, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964.]