An essay is only complete when there is nothing left to delete
If you had a formal education in the UK during the past few decades, you will doubtless have been assigned essays with a stipulated minimum number of words. And you may well have been marked down for using bullet points, or for starting a sentence with ‘And’. Yet this still-favoured approach encourages quantity over quality, and style over substance.
We have all seen legal case documents wheeled into the Court on goods trolleys. Were so many words really necessary? Could the judge possibly find and read all that was relevant to the case? If not, did justice prevail?
How many documents about safety procedures go unread because they are too long? How many important tasks go unfulfilled because the relevant reports, written in formal sentences and paragraphs, lack structure and clarity?
If you are a teacher or lecturer, and you have any say in the matter, introduce your students to the concept of brevity and then put an upper-bound on their essays. Future generations will thank you for it, and you may be pleasantly surprised by the short-term results as well.
For problems to be solved, minutes and lives saved, and justice served, say what you mean, make it clear, and keep it brief
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