Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief.

- Hamlet

Life's Little Instruction Book shouldn't read like the maintenance guide for a clothes dryer. The handbook of your life shouldn't flow like stereo instructions. Yet the Society for Technical Communication (STC), of which I recently became a member, could argue persuasively that technical communication is the foundation for much of life's most important documentation. This is, after all, what I do all day: tell people things, reducing each thought to an irreducible ingot of pure word power, each nugget of knowledge about as compelling as the government-mandated list of filling materials on the little tag attached to the butt-end of a stuffed animal manufactured in China.

It's getting harder, too. Look around you; people are stupid. They're getting stupider. And as we, as a society, become increasingly ignorant and thoughtless, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of our technical communication drops accordingly, until I'm tempted to smack my forehead repeatedly into the monitor on my desk -- the monitor whose display of Microsoft Word tells me that the component words I'm using to create my ten-word sentence are themselves at a 12th grade reading level, which means the slack-jawed troglodytes consuming my prose couldn't possibly hope to comprehend those words linked together to form a coherent thought.

My most recent project involves annotating the teacher's guides for a building trade course. Like the Mythical Teacher's Texts of old, these are the Student Texts reproduced at 75% scale, with instructions for the teacher to follow. Each instruction must be no longer than fifteen words, and fit in the margin of the page. There is room for perhaps three instructions (with their accompanying icons) on each page.

I cannot help but think that the teacher's guide might be slightly more useful if it were tattooed on individual Wheat Thins and passed out as snacks at the beginning of each class.

Therein lies the conflict at the heart of my soul. Technical writers must tell themselves that what they do does not involve sucking the marrow from beautiful, full sentences. We must convince ourselves that we do not rob elaborate thoughts of their souls, distilling them to mattress tag warning labels. What if members of STC were turned loose on literature's Greats? Julius Caesar? "Ruler in Toga betrayed, stabbed." Othello? "Dark guy jealous." The Holy Bible? "Pray, and stay out of trouble."

When Hamlet is asked what he's reading and responds, wild-eyed, with "Words, words, words," he's certainly crazed. What the average audience doesn't know is that he's a few heat-resistant tiles short of a safe re-entry not because of his inability to take decisive action and kill the man who murdered his father, but because he's got nothing to read but the owner's manual to a Xerox 5900 photocopier. Hamlet understands that sentences written to a sixth-grade reading level aren't a whole lot of fun. They get the job done, sure; they convey information, and that's all they do. Life is, and should be, richer than that.

Every day when I sit in front of my computer, the two sides of my nature go to war. On one shoulder sits Ernest Hemingway; on the other, H.P. Lovecraft. Both famous writers, both worthy of emulation. But the average Hemingway sentence is two and a half words long. The average H.P. Lovecraft sentence length has yet to be determined, because nobody has finished counting one. Lovecraft wrote paragraphs that went on for months. An entire Hemingway story reads as follows:

"Bring me liquor," I told her.
But she didn't. Instead, she questioned my manhood.
I fought a wolverine, naked, to prove her wrong.

Ernest Hemingway even has a line of furniture by Thomasville. It's all dark wood and very masculine, visually beautiful but ergonomically stark. I can't help but wonder: what does a line of furniture inspired by Ernest Hemingway really say? "This chair is so uncomfortable... I think I'll blow my head off with a shotgun."

The delightfully verbose Lovecraft doesn't have a furniture line, but if he did, I'm sure it would be designed by H.R. Giger. I saw an interview with Giger regarding his creature designs for the movie Alien. He was sitting in his dining room, and his black metallic dining room chairs were topped with stylized skulls. Now there is a man who probably understands a good, wordy sentence, stuffed with descriptors and in no hurry to push you past its verb to its predicate.

As I sit before my computer, I contemplate another day of restraining my natural penchant for verbosity. I contemplate another day of carving up perfectly good sentences, reducing them to quivering blobs of linguistic sushi fit only for describing how to clean a dryer's lint trap.

And I do it with a smile, because all the while I'm doing this, it's financing my unpublished fiction, my collection of Lovecraft and Hemingway and books about knives, and afternoons spent happily perusing used book stores with my lovely wife. But even aware as I am that technical writing is my trade, I urge you to reject it. Embrace the verbose, my friends. Embrace A Tale of Two Cities in all its unabridged glory. Hurl your Reader's Digest condensed books into the village burn barrel next to blackened copies of Rosie's McCalls. Embrace the richness of life, and all the cluttered, extra words that this implies. As for me...