Young writers may learn something of the secrets of Economy by careful revision of their own compositions, and by careful dissection of passages selected both from good and bad writers.  They have simply to strike out every word, every clause, and every sentence, the removal of which will not carry away any of the constituent elements of the thought.  Having done this, let them compare the revised with the unrevised passages, and see where the excision has improved, and where it has injured, the effect.  For Economy, although a primal law, is not the only law of Style.  It is subject to various limitations from the pressure of other laws; and thus the removal of a trifling superfluity will not be justified by a wise economy if that loss entails a dissonance, or prevents a climax, or robs the expression of its ease and variety.  Economy is rejection of whatever is superfluous; it is not Miserliness.  A liberal expenditure is often the best economy, and is always so when dictated by a generous impulse, not by a prodigal carelessness or ostentatious vanity.  That man would greatly err who tried to make his style effective by stripping it of all redundancy and ornament, presenting it naked before the indifferent public.  Perhaps the very redundancy which he lops away might have aided the reader to see the thought more clearly, because it would have kept the thought a little longer before his mind, and thus prevented him from hurrying on to the next while this one was still imperfectly conceived.

As a general rule, redundancy is injurious; and the reason of the rule will enable us to discriminate when redundancy is injurious and when beneficial.  It is injurious when it hampers the rapid movement of the reader’s mind, diverting his attention to some collateral detail.  But it is beneficial when its retarding influence is such as only to detain the mind longer on the thought, and thus to secure the fuller effect of the thought.  For rapid reading is often imperfect reading.  The mind is satisfied with a glimpse of that which it ought to have steadily contemplated; and any artifice by which the thought can be kept long enough before the mind, may indeed be a redundancy as regards the meaning, but is an economy of power.  Thus we see that the phrase or the clause which we might be tempted to lop away because it threw no light upon the proposition, would be retained by a skilful writer because it added power.  You may know the character of a redundancy by this one test:  does it divert the attention, or simply retard it?  The former is always a loss of power; the latter is sometlmes a gain of power.  The art of the writer consists in rejecting all redundancies that do not conduce to clearness.  The shortest sentences are not necessarily the clearest.  Concision gives energy, but it also adds restraint.  The labour of expanding a terse sentence to its full meaning is often greater than the labour of picking out the meaning from a diffuse and loitering passage.  Tacitus is more tiresome than Cicero.