#amwriting#singleWord

#AmWriting #Singleword 2018 – Brevity

            I approach the end of 2017 fairly disappointed in my 2017 writing attempts. I am adopting a single word strategy as a response to guide my writing in the coming year.

            “BREVITY” is my single word. One of my flaws in writing is writing pieces that are long and meandering. A focus on brevity is needed. I have other writing concerns as well. A number of them I will pursue by using “BREVITY” as an acronym expressing some of those considerations. For the sake of brevity in this post I will write on the contents of the acronym in future writings.

            A question I would like to ask other writers including aspiring ones, is what are the reasons you feel you might at times be less brief than you desire? Also what measures have you found helpful to make brevity a habit of your writing rather than an exception to your writing style?

            For me, my writing meanders aimlessly when I forget that blog writing is best used as a genre where one participates in an ongoing human conversation. In a conversation the one who tries to express his entire mind’s thinking on a subject will soon be standing alone in an empty room wondering where everyone else went. It is essential in blogging, which is the form of writing I most often do, to distinguish how we think about matters from how we discuss them in a conversation. In our thinking we often take a subject matter and begin contemplating its relationships with other subject matters until it is part of an entire world view regarding the Cosmos. I have been most long winded when I thought it would be helpful to go into numerous details about how my subject matter fit into the big picture. Instead of lighting a pathway for my reader to gain a better understanding, I spread information here and there until the reader had no idea what my actual main point was. Instead of trying to show the relationship of the main point to everything under the sun, it is usually more helpful to write briefly marshalling every thought of a piece to highlight the main idea of the piece. Thus for me a key to writing briefly will be selecting a main point I want others to consider and then making everything in the piece I write help highlight the theme I selected.

            I think this is a good place for me to begin in my search to reshape the way I write. I would welcome writers or readers who have thoughts to share on how and you made headway on learning to write with brevity. Also share with us either on this page or on the media site that led you to this blog piece, what author you think of who seems to model brevity in their writing. Writers usually learn by imitating the excellence they discover in reading writings by other authors.