Write Lean, Write Clean
Free your prose of crutch words.
“Blurby, blurby, blurby,” shouted C. Robert Constable, my high school English teacher. He stared in mock anger for a beat at the guilty student. His eyes magnified into huge googly-eyes by the thick lenses of his glasses. Then, with drama, he broke and cracked a smile. “Yogi,” as we called him in honor of his bear-like persona, was on a mission. Rumors were a-wing. Graduates from our rural Ohio high school had flunked English at a nearby college. Yogi was tasked with teaching us to write.
My friends and I loved Yogi. He treated students with respect, friendship, and frankness. We repaid him by not squealing to the principal when he lumbered up to the second-floor classroom, late for homeroom. After graduation, he starred as the sole teacher we visited. We dropped in on him at his home in Yellow Springs and watched him as he cooked exotica. For us inexperienced Midwesterners, that meant he stir fried icicle radishes. Not only had we never witnessed stir frying, we had no idea radishes could be six inches long and white.
Yogi’s mantra for excellence was to limit our writing to only necessary words and to make those words vivid. In our spot of the world and at that time, there existed a tendency to confuse ornate, flowery speech with education, style, and substance. Useless filler phrases like “in my opinion” and “seemed…
