Alan Nelson is the person who helped me make sense of blogging during a flight from Bonaire to San Juan, Puerto Rico a few months ago, and thus inspired me to start this blog (thank you Alan!).
Recently, Alan launched the latest of his many blogs - Seat 1A. (As an anecdote, I should mention that when I met Alan, he sat in Seat 1A of our ATR-72 to San Juan, while I sat in 1B - row 1 being the only row with leg room on these small planes.)
In his latest blog entry, Alan succinctly covers the issue of pruning, as suggested by the author of the most excellent book Getting Things Done (a must-read for anyone who has problems getting through his or her to-do list on a regular basis, and in a timely fashion).
Basically, as I understand it, pruning involves taking what one has written and then removing words without destroying the essence of what one needs to convey.
This is something I have tried to work on over the years as I have gotten involved in patent litigation matters - brevity for things like claim constructions is a highly prized skill, and one that causes great agony as the meaning of each word - and every nuance thereof, must be carefully analyzed before being permanently committed to paper. That’s because the other side will then attempt to rip your work apart, and you must be able to defend what you commit to - every nuance of it.
However, as a matter of practice, I pretty much suck at “pruning”. I find it far easier to write 800 words to say something than to use 400 words to say the same thing. The most difficult writing assignment I ever had was for PC Magazine about 15 years ago, when I was asked to describe in detail this very cool (at the time) technology from a company called Edsun Labs, in a 400 word article. That article took me about five times as long to complete than doing the same thing in double the number of words would have taken. And while my editor liked the result, I was not happy with it because I felt it left too much unsaid.
If you’ve seen Milos Forman’s movie Amadeus starring Tom Hulce, you may recall a scene where Mozart presents his latest composition to the King, who after a moment’s contemplation asks the court composer for comment. The response is “too many notes”, and the King, apparently not wanting to appear ignorant, agrees, although the comment is pretty nonsensical. Mozart then asks “Which notes should I take out, your highness?”.
Any reader of my blog might also note that brevity (at least in writing) is not my strong suit. But for that I make no apology. It’s the way I have learned to enjoy writing (this coming from a person who dodged writing-dependent courses in high school and college as if they were poison), and will likely continue to do so in the future.
And thus I may suffer from “too many notes”, but at least I will have said what I wanted to say, with just the right number of words for me.
