The economy of words

Claire Doll
MSMU Class of 2024

(9/2022) I love words.

I love novels, I love stories, I love letters and notes and the mere beauty of the written word. I have journals dating back to my freshman year of high school, filled cover-to-cover with detailed entries of my days, emotions, dreams, and wishes. As an English education major, I am constantly reading something, and sometimes I feel that I will never read enough. That there are so many words out there, jumbled together to create different meanings. That no amount of words will truly convey how a human can feel, no matter how complex and articulate we make them out to be.

Of course, I am wrong.

In fact, I am way, way off.

In high school, I took advanced creative writing all four years, and I instantly fell in love with storytelling and plots and imagery. I never realized how much you could do with words, and this amazed me. Yet, I also never realized how much you could do with so few words. How you could write just a handful on a page, yet evoke unreachable and unexpected emotions. How this type of writing—which I like to refer to as poetry—is powerful and beautiful, allowing a writer to transcend beyond the standards of the English language to define the abstract in a unique and meaningful way.

My high school creative writing teacher once told me: "Poetry is the economy of words." That is, for one to write poetry, the poet must consider each word closely. What image, if any, does the word help depict? Does the word contribute to the poem’s rhythm and musical value? Could the poem survive without this word—would it still hold the same meaning?

This is because poetry, unlike prose, delivers an emotional experience through the artistic, individual choices one makes regarding language. A novelist might take 80,000 words to develop a plot and characters, but a poet takes only a handful to both paint an image and evoke an emotional experience. So, poetry works like an economy. Writers must determine what they would like to get out of the poem, therefore carefully managing their resources—in this case, words—to achieve their meaning.

In fact, poetry does something even greater, in my opinion. Imagine any poem: lines and stanzas, broken apart by rhythm and structure. On paper, a poem is also meant to be visually appealing to the reader. That is, the poet must use the blank, white space surrounding the words to his or her advantage. The poet must balance words with emptiness to show the readers just how important and carefully chosen his or her words are.

Because of its beauty and its inevitable effect on humans, poetry has been here for centuries. Poems have been written to elicit emotional reactions, to cater to a certain audience, and to even comment on historical events and social issues.

Does this sound familiar?

Perhaps not. After all, what other form of communication delivers a message to a targeted audience by using an economy of words and language?

While social media is not poetry, the two have many similarities. How many times have you struggled to write a tweet or an Instagram caption, knowing you had a limited number of characters? Did you have to rethink which words to use, keeping in mind your audience and overall message? If so—which plenty of us have—you may have been thinking like a poet.

I have never heard someone bash poetry for being incapable of "discussing complex things at length," but I have certainly heard this said for social media. And again, although the two forms of communication are in no way identical, they both require an economy of words. They require someone to understand the deep meaning a single word can evoke, and they demand that writers use limited language to convey so much.

This kind of writing has grown in popularity. While poetry is originally defined as "the economy of words," this logic is especially significant in an age where instantaneous communication is necessary. Where ideas and thoughts can be voiced in seconds, for thousands of people to read—and no sane person wants to read a 1,000-word Instagram caption.

Meaning is not lost when we set a word count. If anything, meaning is prioritized. It is unrealistic to think that writing surrenders its beauty when given a limit. Beauty is found in the writer’s ability to take just even ten words and arrange them in such a way that it impacts an entire population of people. Something that takes thirty seconds to read may have taken hours to write; this truth is apparent in both poetry and social media, among other forms of communication. And although 1,000 words might allow a writer to dive into the deep complexities of their topic, 75 words on the same topic forces the writer to consider the effect of their carefully chosen language, which ultimately hits harder. After all, less is more, and words have done so much for us. It is only fair that we take the time to isolate them and consider their meanings, their impacts, and their full potentials.

I love words. I love writing, and I certainly feel thankful and overjoyed to write 1,000-word articles for the Emmitsburg News-Journal each month; this allows me to write and explain more, and if you know me, I love doing those things. But I also love poetry, and I love writing Instagram captions, and I love how words can mean so much by using so little. I love how there are other things to consider besides the number of words, such as the surrounding empty space, the rhythm of language, and the images painted by words, and I love how writing then becomes a mosaic, using different pieces and elements to create art.

After all, words strive to make us feel something. So as long as words can make me cry, laugh, or even just smile, then I don’t care how many of them I read.

Read other articles by Claire Doll