Patricia Evangelista's Some People Need Killing, a harrowing chronicle of the state-sanctioned street murders under former Philippine president Roderigo Duterte, contains this section:
"It’s handy to have a small vocabulary in my line of work. The names go first, then the casualty counts. Colors are good to get the description squared away. The hill is green. The sky is black. The backpack is purple, and so is the bruising on the woman’s left cheek.
Small words are precise. They are exactly what they are and are faster to type when the battery is running down.
I like verbs best. They break stories down into logical movements, trigger to finger, knife to gut: crouch, run, punch, drown, shoot, rip, burst, bomb."
Image: Verbs
Especially when subjects are weighty, complex, or traumatic, spare language made up of mostly nouns ("backpack," "trigger") and verbs ("crouch," "drown") and, when modifiers are necessary, simple ones ("Black," "purple"), satisfies a reader more than overwriting could ever dream of doing.
Evangelista is a journalist, a profession we associate with the adage "just the facts, ma'am." Yet consider these paragraphs again.
How much more evocative are they than a wordy, modifier-filled passage?