They'd do their bottom lines a big favor by sending every employee the link to John McPhee's latest article in The New Yorker, "Omission."
McPhee clarifies why lean writing is good writing: it's what's left out that counts.
Lean writing comes from heavy editing, which McPhee compares to shortening a train.
"The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed," he says. "It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train—or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics."
Not only editors, but artists, designers and comedians understand that, always, less is more.
Hemingway called it the Iceberg Theory:
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
