Concision

For the term in media studies, see Concision (media studies).
"Succinct" and "Concise" redirect here. For other uses, see Succinct (disambiguation) and Concise (disambiguation).

In common usage and linguistics, concision (also called conciseness, succinctness,[1] terseness, brevity, or laconicism) is a communication principle[2] of eliminating redundancy,[3] generally achieved by using as few words as possible in a sentence while preserving its meaning. More generally, it is achieved through the omission of parts that impart information that was already given, that is obvious or that is irrelevant. Outside of linguistics, a message may be similarly "dense" in other forms of communication.

For example, a sentence of "It is a fact that most arguments must try to convince readers, that is the audience, that the arguments are true." may be expressed more concisely as "Most arguments must demonstrate their truth to readers." – the observations that the statement is a fact and that readers are its audience are redundant, and it is unnecessary to repeat the word "arguments" in the sentence.[4]

"Laconic" speech or writing refers to the pithy bluntness that the Laconian people of ancient Greece were reputedly known for.[5]

In linguistic research, there have been approaches to analyze the level of succinctness of texts using semantic analysis.[6]

  1. ^ Garner, Bryan A. (2009). Garner on Language and Writing: Selected Essays and Speeches of Bryan A. Garner. Chicago: American Bar Association. p. 295. ISBN 978-1-60442-445-4.
  2. ^ William Strunk (1918). The Elements of Style.
  3. ^ UNT Writing Lab. "Concision, Clarity, and Cohesion." Accessed June 19, 2012. Link.
  4. ^ Program for Writing and Rhetoric, University of Colorado at Boulder. "Writing Tip #27: Revising for Concision and Clarity." Accessed June 19, 2012. Link. Archived 2012-06-14 at the Wayback Machine ""It is a fact that most arguments must try to convince readers, that is the audience, that the arguments are true." Notice the beginning of the sentence: "it is a fact that" doesn't say much; if something is a fact, just present it. So begin the sentence with "most arguments..." and turn to the next bit of overlap. Look at "readers, that is the audience"; the redundancy can be reduced to "readers" or "audience." Now we have "Most arguments must try to convince readers that the arguments are true." Let's get rid of one of the "arguments" to produce "Most arguments must demonstrate (their) truth to readers," or a similarly straightforward expression."
  5. ^ Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose, Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 131–2, 135.
  6. ^ https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/212996487.pdf [bare URL PDF]