"Vigorous writing is concise"
About this Quote
“Vigorous writing is concise” is Strunk’s blunt little dare to every writer who hides behind clutter. “Vigorous” doesn’t mean ornamental or “high style”; it means alive on the page, with verbs doing the heavy lifting and sentences arriving with purpose. Concision, in this frame, isn’t austerity for its own sake. It’s an ethic: respect the reader’s time, respect your own thinking, and don’t pad uncertainty with extra syllables.
The subtext is almost moralistic, which tracks with Strunk’s early-20th-century context. Writing instruction in that era was welded to ideas of discipline and order - a corrective to florid Victorian prose and the bureaucratic bloat of modern institutions. Strunk is arguing that clarity is a kind of honesty. If you know what you mean, you can say it cleanly; if you can’t, the sentence will sprawl, hedging and qualifying until it becomes a fog machine.
What makes the line work is its severity. It’s a one-sentence style guide with no room for negotiation, the rhetorical equivalent of a teacher tapping the blackboard. Strunk also slips in a provocative equivalence: energy comes not from more language, but from less. That inversion still stings because it challenges a common insecurity - the idea that “real” writing must sound impressive. Strunk’s wager is that the strongest prose doesn’t perform intelligence; it delivers it.
The subtext is almost moralistic, which tracks with Strunk’s early-20th-century context. Writing instruction in that era was welded to ideas of discipline and order - a corrective to florid Victorian prose and the bureaucratic bloat of modern institutions. Strunk is arguing that clarity is a kind of honesty. If you know what you mean, you can say it cleanly; if you can’t, the sentence will sprawl, hedging and qualifying until it becomes a fog machine.
What makes the line work is its severity. It’s a one-sentence style guide with no room for negotiation, the rhetorical equivalent of a teacher tapping the blackboard. Strunk also slips in a provocative equivalence: energy comes not from more language, but from less. That inversion still stings because it challenges a common insecurity - the idea that “real” writing must sound impressive. Strunk’s wager is that the strongest prose doesn’t perform intelligence; it delivers it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | The Elements of Style — William Strunk Jr., 1918. Listed among the 'Elementary Principles of Composition' (source of the aphorism "Vigorous writing is concise"). |
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