{"id":3702,"date":"2014-09-27T06:58:58","date_gmt":"2014-09-27T10:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3702"},"modified":"2015-01-03T06:59:57","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T11:59:57","slug":"the-soul-of-wit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3702","title":{"rendered":"The Soul of Wit"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"scissors,<\/a>

Editing Done (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the best career moves I ever made was a freelance gig I designed for myself in which I wrote weekly columns about health policy that I self-syndicated to newspapers. This was back before health issues became a constant drumbeat when few news outlets had a regular health correspondent. <\/span>I lived in Washington, D.C., I had access to experts and government officials, these topics interested me, and I believed people needed to know more about them. From a content perspective, totally correct; from a business income perspective, hopeless.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I never made much money at it\u2014the largest-circulation paper to pick up the column was the Cleveland Plain-Dealer<\/em>\u2014but I what I learned was pure gold. Not about health policy. About saying what you have to say in 750 words or less. Medicare, Medicaid, care organization, mental health\u2014these are complicated issues. 750 words (or less). It\u2019s helped my writing every day since. Extra words and long-winded phrases still drive me crazy, and Twitter\u2019s easy.<\/p>\n

That makes me the perfect cheerleader for Mandy Wallace\u2019s excellent blog post<\/a> on \u201ccutting the fluff from your fiction\u201d\u2014though anyone who writes as much as a memo can benefit from at least some of her advice. She links to other helpful resources, and I\u2019d bet you\u2019ll find some pet phrases (I did!) in the appalling catalog of redundant phrases. Interestingly, the first of her \u201c5 powerful techniques\u201d connects to an essay on \u201cThought\u201d Verbs that definitely will not produce a shorter text, but a more meaningful one, shorter only by elimination of empty words. Another good outcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the best career moves I ever made was a freelance gig I designed for myself in which I wrote weekly columns about health policy that I self-syndicated to newspapers. This was back before health issues became a constant … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Soul of Wit","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[104,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-morgue","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-XI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3703,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3702\/revisions\/3703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}