BREVITY & A Rationale for Conciseness (It Gets Your Articles Read)

by Bob Whitesel Ph.D., 7/17/15.

In my courses I usually give my students a page range for their papers that is usually a bit shorter than they want to write.  But, I believe part for the learning experience is learning how to edit for conciseness.  And, I know from personal experience this is hard to do.  Let me explain.

When I wrote my second book, Staying Power: Why People Leave the Church Over Change and What You Can Do About It (Abingdon Press, 2002), I felt the topic (a process model of how group exits occur) required more depth.  I thus, submitted a book of approximately 270 pages (with footnotes).  However, the publisher came back and asked me to trim 70 pages!

This hit me right in the gut.  I had many good ideas, illustrations and insights in those 70 pages.  And now, they would be lost forever.  It was like cutting off part of me.  Yet, I had no option.

And, once the 70 pages were gone (72 actually) the book was much, much better.  Sure, there were things I had written, and insights I had suggested that would never be read.  But now the overall tenor of the book was better, and more people would read it and more people would benefit from its ideas.  It was hard to do, but it was helpful for my message.

But it was not due to this experience that I started requiring students to be brief as well.  I had already required students to be concise, for I realized as a former senior editor of a national leadership magazine that brevity gets writings read.  Yet with the illustration above, it had been brought home to me personally.  This exercise with my publisher had made me a better writer, thinker and communicator.  And, since my courses are about making students better thinkers and scholars, brevity and succinctness assist in the process.

I do remind students that charts, figures and graphs can be included in Appendixes.  And these Appendixes do not count (nor do title pages or abstracts) toward your page total.

And so, I require my students to reread their papers and edit it a few times (I personally do three edits – one electronically, then I print it out and edit with a red pen, then I give it a final electronic edit).

The result will be a paper you will be proud to share, and one which will have greater opportunity to be read/published and thus spread your good insights to others who need them.