Concise Writing through Careful Adjectives

I imagine that writing for print magazines and newspapers is a tricky task given the word limits that many of the writers in these media operate under. To adequately convey important ideas in just a few hundred words requires some deft linguistic and syntactic skill.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. In a recent column for Wired magazine, Brendan I. Koerner (known as Mr. Know-It-All in the magazine and online and a regular contributor to Wired), answered a question about the true nature of those Kindle books we “buy” from Amazon. I love this sentence from his answer for how it conveys a lot in a few words:

Amazon’s terms of service clearly state that, unlike those bulky slabs of arboreal matter that imparted knowledge to generations past, Kindle books can never be owned in the traditional sense.

I was drawn first to his use of the adjective arboreal and just how much that one word conveys about the history of paper–and, perhaps, the broader ecological implications of the process of paper-making. The latter suggestion is reinforced by the use of the phase bulky slabs to describe books made of paper. The phrase imparted knowledge to generations past is similarly laden with historical meaning (or it could be seen as tongue-in-cheek). There’s a lot of possibility in just these few words.

And note, too, that all this is contained in an adjective phrase set off by commas that interrupts the noun clause to describe Kindle books–a phrase we would likely describe as parenthetical, meaning that the sentence would satisfy the demands of syntax without the material in this phrase. But I think it’s hardly parenthetical to the meaning and tone of the sentence, and it’s what is added by phrases like this that make writing come alive for me.