Saturday, March 4, 2006

Edit

I've been meaning to post this for three years. I am a man of few words. I appreciate brevity. When I start a book, I always thumb to the back to see how many pages it is. If it's more than four or five hundred (it often is, no matter how trivial the theme) I sigh or cluck or tsk tsk. This is when my wife takes the book and bonks me on the head with it.

I assume most editors are lazy. They perform a valuable service, but not enough of it.

I also am a long time hater of business-speak. Three years and a few months ago, I ran across a memo posted in my company's breakroom that set off both my verbosity and anti-corp-speak alarms. It was full of excess words and pompous, official sounding phrases. So I edited it. And left it there. After a couple of weeks, I took it down for posterity.