Process Beginnings Endings  Persuasion Paragraphs Tone Flow Parallelism Inflation Conciseness Verbs Clutter Conventions	10. Be concise
	You should be stingy with words because only concise writing will keep the reader concentrated on your ideas. Click here for more theory of conciseness. The idea of conciseness should never be an invitation to mutilation, so if you find that because of its conciseness, your sentence has become opaque or choppy, put back in the extra words. Though conciseness is a virtue in writing, it should never overpower greater virtues like naturalness or clarity. It is, of course, possible to become too concise, to leave out so many words that the writing becomes distractingly choppy or opaque. Conciseness is a matter not of removing words necessary for meaning or for smoothing, but of distilling the writing to the essential. Start with the idea of greatest importance to the reader Reduce your statements to those only of interest to the reader Reduce metadiscourse Reduce redundancy Reduce traditional wordy phrases Reduce wordy adverbial phrases Go on a which hunt Collapse plodding explanations
	Courtesy of John Mercer Associates, www.MercerWriting.com ==>Guidelines