Long ago (1656), Blaise Pas­cal wrote an apolo­getic note that edi­tors have been quot­ing at pro­lix writ­ers ever since:

The present let­ter is a very long one, sim­ply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Brevi­ty is a key to effec­tive writ­ing, if noth­ing else because it’s hard to hold a read­er’s atten­tion, but also for styl­is­tic rea­sons. Short sen­tences lend emphasis. 

Alas, it’s slow and painful.

Three hun­dred years after Pas­cal, Strunk and White’s Ele­ments of Style again empha­sized the insis­tence on remov­ing need­less words wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, one of sev­er­al Strunk and White choic­es ques­tioned by oth­er style guides. Appar­ent­ly, though, even White had to stand up for the occa­sion­al extra word. Maria Popo­va quotes this let­ter from White to a read­er who missed the point:

Dear Mr. â€“

It comes down to the mean­ing of ‘needless.’ Often a word can be removed with­out destroy­ing the struc­ture of a sen­tence, but that does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that the word is need­less or that the sen­tence has gained by its removal.

If you were to put a nar­row con­struc­tion on the word ‘needless,’ you would have to remove tens of thou­sands of words from Shake­speare, who sel­dom said any­thing in six words that could be said in twen­ty. Writ­ing is not an exer­cise in exci­sion, it’s a jour­ney into sound. How about ‘tomorrow and tomor­row and tomor­row’*? One tomor­row would suf­fice, but it’s the oth­er two that have made the thing immortal.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your letter.

Yrs,

E. B. White

(That aster­isk seems to be Popo­va’s who seems to fear that the read­er may not catch the ref­er­ence to Mac­beth. What an age we live in!)

A help­ful pas­sage to bear in mind next time an edi­tor takes too dull a blade to your writing.