I heard this expression from my mother and grandmother a great deal as a young woman. Both of them knew how to dress very well. But it was the 80′s (let’s face it – a real low point for fashion in many ways) and I was more concerned with how much gel it would take to make my bangs stay straight up in the air like that all day long.

It’s tough to write. Really. I do it because I need to – otherwise all those words floating around in my head have no place to go, and that gets annoying after a while. But perhaps I’m making it tougher than I have to.

Every few months, I re-read my Strunk and White, Elements of Style, like a novel. What a wonderful little book. Every time I take just a few minutes with it, I realize something new. Right now, I’m focused on an area I’ve never really thought about before, which is the instruction, “Do not explain too much”.

For a technical writer, and a wordy gal like myself, that’s a toughie. We’re paid to explain everything in all those teensy details, in a usable way. But for most business and non-fiction writing, it is not necessary to explain every little teeny thing. Isn’t all that explaining what makes most writing difficult?

By knowing exactly what to explain, and what not to, we are accomplishing that great thing that all writers aspire to do: to tell the story. Don’t tell the reader anything they don’t need to know, because you will just confuse the real message.

It’s true that when a word is wasted, it’s like that extra bow on the back of the dress that just doesn’t look right. People look at the bow, and not the woman wearing the dress. I’m here to tell you – because I’ve had that bow myself – that all it does is make your rear end look huge. I must remind myself to take off that extra word, remove the uneccesary sentence, and just wear the dress. Period. End of sentence. Absolutely. And that’s all I’m going to let myself say.