Opinion : The enigma of breviloquence

Several people in the past three years have offered advice about what I should do with this space.

Those who have not suggested using this page to line bird cages or finding someone with something worth reading to fill this column have all expressed the same thing.

They want me to make my columns shorter.

And I tried. I really did.

But the harder I try to write shorter, the longer my columns become. But the secret to short writing – also known as the enigma of breviloquence – eludes me.

I just don’t get it.

My story and column writing process always begins slowly, with an idea to share or a fact to relay. But by the time I get done presenting those, I realize that I have taken up more space than I planned to.

I’d like to write shorter, I really would. It would save time and make this page look more readable.

But when I do write short, and I get to what I originally thought was going to be the end, I see all the things that I didn’t say. Sometimes, I start out writing short, and I have a few ideas in mind.

But by the time those few ideas have been duly acknowledged and typed (and re-typed several times since the only class I ever flunked in high school was typing, thank God for the delete/backspace key), I have come to the end of the space long before I have come to the end of words.

Shortness, said one person who teaches this trade, is “in the re-write.”

But the more I re-write, the longer my writing becomes. I have, on occasion, been able to remove a word or two, but usually, when I remove one word, it leaves a gap that an entire paragraph can’t fill.

Since I did not take any formal journalism training (or very much informal training, either), my sense of what do to is based on two things: What I see other people do, and what I have done in my unguided past.

For example, one of my favorite columnists, Mike Royko, typically wrote 800 to 900 words per day. Yet another of my favorites, Peggy Noonan, often exceeds 1,400 words in her Wall Street Journal articles.

Yet, the Universal Press Syndicate, which decides which columns to give to newspapers across the country, tells writers to limit themselves to 650 to 700 words.

(If you are counting, you will note that up until the last paragraph, my column contained 404 words.)

If you read a newspaper from the early 1900s, you will see that there seem to be many more words per page than our current editions. But in our sitcom-watching society that depends on laugh tracks to tell us what’s funny and music to tell us what’s dramatic or scary, we’ve stopped thinking for ourselves. And our attention span is shrinking.

”You want to write on a fifth-grade level, because that’s the average reading level of the American public, and you aren’t going to change that with a long article with big fancy words,” was one of the informal lessons I received in my early years of journalism.

While I know I can’t change that trend, I still have days when it’s tough to follow it.

I may be able to write briefly on some days, but sometimes, I’ve learned, an attempt to produce brevity results in an utter failure of breviloquence.