Twitter Concision

Twitter Concision

Call up your Twitter account. Copy the first sentence into Twitter and see how few characters you can boil sentence down to.

1. Mellon said his staff accomplished a reduction of long waits in driver’s license offices in the past three months. 
   
2. Mellon said his staff has experienced progress in the past three months toward accomplishing a reduction of waits of four and five hours at some driver’s license offices.
   
3. Mellon said that his staff has been successful in reducing wait times. 
   
4. The average length of waiting time at the offices in Dade County dropped by half.
   
5. They reduced the waiting times that some driver’s license offices experienced. 
   
6. Vacancies went only to those who were able to speak the Spanish language.
7. They applied for part-time janitorial jobs with the company so that they could earn additional money.
8. With the cooperation of Smith, police were able to arrest several suspects. 
9. Prosecution spokesperson Sandi Gibbons said Love would be arrested if and when she returns to California.
10. A 2006 Humvee crashed into the back of the Centre County school bus yesterday around 3 p.m at the intersection of Portry Avenue and 15th street. Traffic was halted for five hours. 
11. A Navy Blue Angel jet crashed at about 4 p.m. during the final minutes of the air show Saturday. 
12. The jet plunged into a neighborhood of small homes and trailers located about 35 miles northwest of Hilton Head Island. Eight people on the ground were injured, and the pilot, who had been on the team for two years, was killed in the accident. The Navy is conducting an investigation.
13. The squid was frozen in the ship's hull and brought back to New Zealand for scientific examination and study.

George Orwell's Five Rules for Writing

This is from his essay Politics and the English Language http://www.george-orwell.org/Politics_and_the_English_Language/0.html


(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you
can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep
change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style
now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English,
but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in these five
specimens at the beginning of this article. 

Here is one of those examples from earlier in essay:

Here is a well-known verse from ECCLESIASTES:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches
to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and
chance happeneth

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to
be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of
the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.