6 - Maximizing efficiency The fourth C: Concision

Summary

In this chapter you will

1. • learn how to recognize and eliminate redundant pairs

2. • discover how to spot and weed out unnecessary narration, hedges, and amplifiers

3. • understand why you should avoid using negatives

4. • know how to recognize linguistic fossils and throat-clearing.

PRESIDENT: Well, you had quite a day, today, didn't you? You got, uh, Watergate, uh on the way, huh?

HALDEMAN: How did it all end up?

DEAN: Uh, I think we can say “Well” at this point. The, uh, the press is playing it just as we expect.

HALDEMAN: Whitewash?

DEAN: No, not yet; the, the story right now –

PRESIDENT: It's a big story.

DEAN: Yeah.

PRESIDENT: (Unintelligible)

HALDEMAN: Five indicted,

DEAN: Plus,

HALDEMAN: Just so they have the fact that one of –

DEAN: plus two White House aides.

HALDEMAN: Plus, plus the White House former guy and all that. That's good. That, that takes the edge off whitewash, really – which – which was the thing Mitchell kept saying that …

PRESIDENT: Yeah.

In 1974, the Chicago Tribune published a forty-four-page excerpt of taped Oval Office conversations, unedited and never intended for public consumption. The meeting, held September 15, 1972, followed on the heels of the press airing a link between the Nixon Administration and five men arrested during a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters, which they clearly intended to bug. At the time, the American public found Nixon's vocabulary shockingly rich in the four-letter words some media outlets still touchingly bleep out as if protecting our tender ears from corruption. But this snippet of business-as-usual conversation in the White House might also seem remarkable for the lack of real information traded between an American president, his Chief of Staff, and the White House Counsel.