Short

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

—Ernest Hemingway

Some things never change.

Good writing has never changed, even though writing itself has—a lot. 

We have, for example, seen use of the subjunctive (as in, "It's necessary my boss be at the meeting") nearly cease; sentence fragments (as in, "No can do") achieve acceptance; and verb conversions (such as "impact," "onboard," and "minoritize") shake off the stench of barbarism.

But good writing remains unchanged.

Good writing is good, first and foremost, because it's short. It coveys what's essential and leaves out the rest. Readers get the writer's point, because the point is made straightaway. 

And the wisdom in brevity never changes, as Ernest Hemingway once told his editor.

"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.

"It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short," Hemingway said. 

"The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."