Web Writing: A “Write Tight” Exercise

Do you want to develop good web-writing skills?

In his excellent 1993 book (updated in 2002), Write Tight: How to Keep Your Prose Sharp, Focused and Concise, William Brohaugh gives us a handy exercise that gets results.

Go back to something you wrote a year or so ago – a blog post, a magazine article, a business report, or a poem – and look for fluff.  Ask yourself how tight it is, not how good it is.  Chances are, you’ll see redundancies, unnecessary words, or phrases that just don’t contribute to the writing.  You may see that you meandered off the subject.  Delete the words and phrases that don’t belong.  I bet the new version gets to the point much faster.

Each time you cut something that shouldn’t be there, the remaining words shine brighter; they work harder.

When you revisit your writing with an eye on concision, you’ll likely see that you can improve your tight-writing skills.

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