Lordy, but some writers are too wordy!
It ain't shitty, but dang, others are too chatty!
So what I did was to devise a simple test
To winnow out the best from the rest.
Here it goes, carefully read and study it well:
"I saw this fox... It was brown and had a long tail.
Anyhow, it came over to where Buddy, that's Jim's dog, was sleeping.
You remember Buddy.
Jim's dog, the one that's always sleeping on the back porch of his cottage up in--
what's the name of that town?
Winchendon, that's it.
Anyhow, this fox came up to where Buddy was lying and just sort of leapt over him real fast and then he went dashing off into the woods.
There's some beautiful woods up there
I found out later that the fox does this all the time."
Now here's the test, babies and kettlemen.
You try and boil down the wordy and chatty piece above to its very essence, into a much shorter piece, without losing COLOR.
That's the key, people:
shorten and tighten, but don't lose the COLOR.
You're in my journalism intern class today.
This piece has 98 words.
Rewrite it into less than 50 words.
The pithier, the better.
I'm going to sit in my high professorial chair and doze off for a few hours.
When I wake up, I expect papers with less than 50 words on my desk.
The winner's prize: my commitment to edit your next 5 blogs.
I'll help you shape 'em up so they will leap from the page and startle your readers into wide-eyed attention, like the fox in the story.
Ready?
Git!
