How It’s Good To Leave Something Out

Streamlining certain forms of communication or media productions can make them much more interesting and much more entertaining.

Quite simply, fewer words can be much better than many.

When an author eliminates unnecessary words from the manuscript, his or her book is more likely to be the proverbial “page-turner.”

If one interjects some mystery into a song, a play, or a television production, it can draw the audience in.

William Zinsser, in his classic book On Writing Well, talked about how people’s natural inclination is to use too many words when they communicate.

“The secret of good writing,” he explained, “is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.”

A couple of pages later, he was even more blunt: “Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.”

Zinsser — like all the best writers — understood the fine art of keeping people interested. He knew that if the reader has to work too hard, he will soon move on to something else.

Pop culture has learned this as well.

In Charlie Brown cartoons, we don’t see adults. It isn’t because they aren’t there; it’s just that they aren’t important to the story.

We get some mild evidence that the adults in the Peanuts cartoons exist when we hear the “Wonkwonk, wonk-wonk-wonkwonk,” that means an adult is talking.

From 1976-1981, Charlie’s Angels featured a different Charlie — one that we never saw — but one that we got to hear, in every single episode.

Many male viewers carefully looked over the three attractive ladies (the angels) who did investigative police work for Charlie, but they didn’t seem to mind the fact that they never saw Charlie himself.

Heck, even the angels didn’t see him, and for a few seasons, it worked.

It also worked when the producers of Seinfeld never let us see the face of New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner.

And in 204 episodes of Home Improvement, we never saw the face of Wilson, the intelligent and insightful neighbor who chatted over the fence to Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor in each show.

In more recent years, we heard the irritating voice of Mrs. Wolowitz on The Big Bang Theory, but we never saw Mrs. Wolowitz.

After several seasons of the sitcom, they wrote Mrs. Wolowitz out of the script by having her pass away, making her appearance forever a mystery.

But her role is cemented in our psyche whether we ever laid eyes on her or not. If you concentrate, you can still hear Mrs. Wolowitz yell to her son, “Howuud!”

During week days, radio listeners can hear Rush Limbaugh comment on any number of issues, periodically speaking to his off-theair colleague “Mr. Snerdley.”

But you don’t hear Snerdley’s voice. (Snerdley is actually James Golden, the show’s call screener, producer and engineer).

Limbaugh and Snerdley banter back and forth during a typical show, but the fact that we don’t actually hear Snerdley lends a unique feature to the broadcast.

The lesson here is that, to inform or to entertain, not all of the information must be disclosed.

Providing every single detail is what makes meetings last too long or causes movies to slow down to a boring pace.

But the best producers and the best communicators understand all of that. They know that leaving something out can be more intriguing and can keep things moving along.

Even in this column, you don’t know what was left out; but that’s okay, as long as you’ve stayed interested to the very end.

“Providing every single detail

DAVID WILSON, EDD, OF SPRINGDALE, IS A FORMER HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL AND IS THE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR FOR THE TRANSIT AND PARKING DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS. HIS BOOK, LEARNING EVERY DAY,

IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON. YOU MAY E-MAIL HIM AT DWNOTES@HOTMAIL.COM. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.