{"id":392,"date":"2005-07-18T13:23:37","date_gmt":"2005-07-18T13:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.truth.posiweb.net\/notes\/?p=392"},"modified":"2005-07-18T13:23:37","modified_gmt":"2005-07-18T13:23:37","slug":"making-words-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2005\/07\/18\/making-words-needed\/","title":{"rendered":"Making words needed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Part of any good advice on writing is to cut everything that isn&#8217;t doing some work. As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bartleby.com\/141\/\" title=\"Strunk's 'Elements of Style'\">the classic<\/a> says <i>&#8216;Omit needless words&#8217;<\/i>, <i>&#8216;Vigourous writing is concise&#8217;<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>It occurs to me that sometimes, especially with scientific writing, that rather than have a choice of what to include and what to omit, you have a fixed number of ideas to include and your task, as a writer, is the mirror of the maxim above. Rather than &#8216;omit needless words&#8217; you must find a way to make needed the words\/ideas you are compelled to include. Any advice on how to do this would be appreciated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Part of any good advice on writing is to cut everything that isn&#8217;t doing some work. As the classic says &#8216;Omit needless words&#8217;, &#8216;Vigourous writing is concise&#8217;. It occurs to me that sometimes, especially with scientific writing, that rather than have a choice of what to include and what to omit, you have a fixed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-6k","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}