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Why Waste Words in Writing

By VJ

When you can simply say “I can do that” why do you tend to write “I am equipped for that?” Why do you tend to say more than enough? This is wasting words. One of the most indefensible writing crimes!

As far as I am concerned, most writers do this crime of wasting a lot of words. Let’s look at it here.

Say, an author wastes one word in every five sentences. There are 80,000 words in his latest novel. And there are 4 words in average in each sentence. This means ideally he wastes the first word of every sentence! Okay, here goes my calculation…

Totally 80,000 divided by (4*5) is what we want (is my math correct? I am weak in it). So, it is 4000. Our author wasted 4000 words in his novel. Now, to read those 4000 words, a reader requires one hour extra, let’s assume. And this is highly economical. Most authors waste far more than that.

One more assumption: our author has twenty books in writing (20 best sellers, each sold one million copies). Now, each book makes one hour waste on extra unnecessary words. So, our author makes 20 million of general public hours wasted! It is up to you to calculate how many days, months, or years it is. There are hundreds of best selling authors, and thousands of non-best selling ones, who give more danger to community than someone like Osama bin-Laden. They are delaying a lot of progress by riveting their readers’ attention on their useless words rather than their useful ones.

It is one thing to be prolific, quite another to be wordy. It is one thing to be creative, quite another to be verbose. Still there you can feel quite a thin wall between them. One good author sees this wall of distinction. Do you see it?

Here are some future posts you may like

How to Write Your First Draft?

Why Superfluity Sustains


Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008
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Comments

  1. franzyMarch 15, 2008 at 8:22 PM

    Hi.
    Thanks for your comment on my blog. How did you come across it?

    I am a "non best-selling author" and I thoroughly disagree that I am more danger to a community than Osama Bin Laden. Thoroughly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. VJMarch 16, 2008 at 10:34 AM

    Hehe, thanks for the comment! I don't mean any author is danger to community by being non-best selling or best selling. I just wanted to exaggerate how wrong it is to waste words.

    ReplyDelete

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