From the Editor’s Corner: To Make Writing Sleek, You Have to Trust Your Reader
I’m something of a beast from two worlds: half the time, I’m doing my own writing, and half I’m editing the work of others. Maybe it was the Hemingway I read growing up, but I’ve always found my own writing short, even curt. It’s not that I’m gruff; rather, it’s borne out of the idea that your time is valuable and I would rather you digest it as quickly as possible, so you can decide whether you want more or to move on.
(It’s since been debunked as a Hemingway story, but I do still love the succinct, terrifying beauty of “baby shoes, never worn” as a story.)
If I really decide to pare down my own writing, I actually take it as a challenge to see how much I can reduce the word count without sacrificing nuance or value. I want every phrase to prove its worth, and if it can be sacrificed, to the chopping block it goes.
So every now and then in the course of my duties I’ll come across a sentence to be edited like this. The spirit of the passage is retained, though greatly shifted around to protect the original writer.
“When the time comes to refinance for a loan, a hard inquiry will hit your report which will lower it a few points or even more. These will eventually roll off over time (24 months, to be precise) but doing too much applying can cause your score to decrease significantly, meaning your ability to even get a loan in the first place will be put in jeopardy. You can also try to shop around for rates and send out a bunch of inquiries in a short period of time so they only ding you once (but read up on that before you do.
In the words of Crow T. Robot after hearing the same line for the fifth time in a particular movie.. “*sigh* Yeah, that’s. Been. ESTABLISHED…!”
First off, here’s how I would fix it.
Each additional hard inquiry will have an adverse, escalating impact on your score that fades as time passes. A workaround is to submit several applications at once so they collapse into a single inquiry hit.
103 words down to 35 —a bit more than a third of the original footprint, with no meaning lost.
Let’s go over my process as to why I cut this down the way I did.
“When the time comes to refinance for a loan,
Meaningless fluff. They’re reading your article, they already know it’s time. They spent it searching for the article. Just kill this wholesale.
a hard inquiry will hit your report which will lower it a few points or even more.
Some useful information here — the reader needs to know the inquiry will hit their score, and that doing it again will hit it harder. “A few points or even more” is completely redundant.
These will eventually roll off over time (24 months, to be precise) but doing too much applying can cause your score to decrease significantly, meaning your ability to even get a loan in the first place will be put in jeopardy.
Oh. Oh, it hurts. The first bit explaining the timeframe isn’t all that bad, after that it’s not only redundant, it’s a redundancy of a redundancy. It’s recursively redundant. We already trimmed this in the last passage, and there’s about 25 words restating what we already felt fit to trim. Trust your reader that they are indeed an astute professional, and not a caveman that needs to be advised why their score going down is in fact a bad thing.
I did take out the bit with 24 months as well, because while it’s technically correct, in all likelihood it will fall off far sooner —in the end there are far too many moving, arcane parts to a credit score to say with certainty, so I would rather not even posit this with authority. (If you feel it’s important to explain this, I wouldn’t grouse at including it as a stylistic choice.)
You can also try to shop around for rates and send out a bunch of inquiries in a short period of time so they only ding you once (but read up on that before you do.
Okay, some decent meat here, and good advice. I really don’t like the parenthetical though. It sounds like a parent chiding their child to not touch the stove, and as a reader I’d find it kind of condescending. Why did they feel the need to bring it up as a potential pitfall, and not elaborate? Is it important, or not? I mean, you mentioned it, of course I’m going to research it to find out why it’s important, but that’s going to potentially send me to a competitor’s article — one that might be more well written than this.
The upshot is your reader is fully capable of using context to fill in the blanks. Through cutting this content, we’ve not only refrained from having the reader feel like an idiot, but also not invited them to Google something that we’ve mentioned and purposefully left unclear.
There’s nothing wrong with restating something, but it needs to be done judiciously and intentionally, such as bookending your starting and concluding paragraphs. Overly handholding your reader will just make your writing a slog to get through, and may turn them off from your product.
If you’re interested in having me look through your own written product (trust me, I don’t bite like I did in this article), feel free to look me up on Upwork or send me an email.