Freshmen Essays
Cutting the Fat

Obesity, as the pun says, is a growing problem. Everywhere freshmen essays are struggling to fit into the svelte clothes of clear communication. But they can’t. They’re fat. Even now, essays of good intention are trying to squeeze through the thresholds of America’s most prestigious universities when they could, with a little diet and exercise, stroll right through the admission doors.

William Strunk, in his seminal work, The Elements of Style, suggests that “vigorous writing is concise.” The assumption here is that vigorous means healthy and concise means lean. To achieve this vigor, eliminate words without purpose or strength. Stick to a diet of nouns and verbs with the occasional adjective and adverb for zest, avoiding very, really, extremely, terribly, and all other fatty intensifiers. Practice concise and precise writing instead. Exercise your essay with single word replacements. Rather than filling the body of your essay with very hungry and extremely tired, try starved and exhausted. Transform a sentence like, “I’ve always been really interested in science and especially physics,” by reducing it to an introduction free of anemic intensifiers. Try, “My interest in animal biology has compelled me to apply to your college.” Such slimming exercises help highlight purpose and can tone an essay.

And essays need to stay fit because obese essays often read like obtuse essays. Therefore, avoid doubling up on words. Essays stuffed with such verbal lard wobble when they could strut. The only difference between a free gift and a gift is that the former is fat. When the writing is careless, the reader is likely to assume the writer is careless, too. Students who write about objects in close proximity do not demonstrate the breadth of their vocabulary, but rather underline their ignorance in the meanings of the words they employ. The best personal trainers in these circumstances are a dictionary and common sense. The former is often abandoned, therefore, when young writers engage in the planned schizophrenia of an adopted alter ego, one informed by the thesaurus feature on Microsoft Word and by kitschy phrases that saturate the media. It could be argued that these errors are few in number and over exaggerated and thus do not affect the essay—but, the point would be argued better if the writer said the errors were few and exaggerated, as few is always a measure of number and exaggerated implies spilling over the brim of truth. When writers swallow this language without consideration, they become ventriloquists’ dummies, speaking a language they do not understand, hoping the audience is laughing with them and not at them. They demonstrate that their knowledge base is fed on by-products of no value or educational nutrition.

In the end, the simplest route to a concise essay is having something to say. Thoughtless essays are typically corpulent. The purposeful essay has an audience in mind, one that will appreciate its brevity. Writing dominated by cliches is sluggish and directionless.

If you can’t write your essay into fitness, remember revision. In the final stage of writing, the writer’s determined, athletic mind should turn into the economic mind of the butcher. As Robert Heinlein said, “The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.” And where daily exercise may fail, the cleaver could succeed.

Editorial is provided by Brian Lutz, of the Delaware Valley College English Department.