By Rachel Toor

There was a time when I offered a bounty to anyone who could tell me the originator of one of my favorite quotations. My literate and literary friends had lots of ideas, mostly wanting to attribute the quip to one of America's two great funny guys, Ben Franklin and Mark Twain.

The Internet was about as helpful as you can imagine—providing a host of authoritative-seeming, contradictory, and, well, wrong opinions. But it wasn't until someone found the original version—in French—and an exact reference that I could feel confident in the knowledge that it was from Blaise Pascal's "Provincial Letter XVI":

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time."

When I get flabby, bloated prose from my students, I whip out that line. When my own writing goes on at self-indulgent length, I know to close the document and give it a rest. The next day, as I reread what I've written, I keep Pascal in mind as I slash and burn through my work.

I think about him, too, when I read other people's letters. Most of us have gotten the advice somewhere along the line not to exceed a page in a letter of recommendation, and to fill no more than two when throwing your hat into the faculty-hiring ring. But the fact is, most of us are not disciplined enough to save ourselves from prose bloat. Often that's not because we have so much of import to convey. It's because we are lazy.

One of my favorite passages comes from E.B. White's introduction to The Elements of Style: "'Omit needless words!' cries the author on page 23, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul." The author of Charlotte's Web continues, "In the days when I was sitting in his class, [Strunk] omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having shortchanged himself—a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock." He got over this, White says, by uttering every sentence three times: "Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!"

Could there be any advice clearer, simpler, and harder to follow than that? Because along with omitting needless words, we must also omit needless sentences, paragraphs, pages, and ideas. To omit them is as easy as, in Arthur Quiller-Couch's words, to "murder your darlings."

If it's difficult to compose a short letter, writing a book of the right length is an even more onerous task.

One of my responsibilities as a young editorial assistant was to "transmit" manuscripts into production. I generally had to paginate each pile of typewritten mess by hand. I had to prepare copyright pages listing all of Oxford University Press's colonial outposts and make sure the illustrations were in order.

For scholarly books, it fell to me choose a design. There were about a dozen templates, with different fonts, leadings, and words per page. The bigger the manuscript, the more words you had to cram onto a page.

Book contracts always specify a word count. In my experience, academics tended to ignore that clause. (Sometimes they also forgot to notice the due date.) It was harder to count words then, before computer programs gave us an up-to-the-minute tally. But that was not, I think, the reason so many projects came in tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of words over their contractually agreed-on length.

Occasionally my boss would send a manuscript back to the author with vague instructions to cut it. But one of the things that made him so beloved as an editor was that he rarely asked authors to do hard work. Sometimes he would give me one of those chubby manuscripts with instructions to slim it down. Having a 23-year-old assistant hack away at the fruit of two decades of your intellectual life can be vexing. If you are not good at making clear what your argument is, and developing it in logical ways, she may not get it, and may suggest cutting things that are central. (She may also ask naïve and irritating questions, or change your meaning by making bad line edits.) This can be, let's just say, an exercise in frustration for everyone.

At other times my boss would just let the fatty go. Academic books with initial print runs of 1,000 copies aren't worth the time and capital spent on editing.

So I'd get the manuscript and shove it into production. If the project was gigantic, I would find a design with teeny-tiny type. Even so, when I'd run the numbers to figure out what price we'd have to set to cover the costs of those 1,000 copies and eke out a 10-percent profit margin—well, that's why we counted on libraries to buy most of the copies. (This was, needless to say, a long time ago.)

Authors would, of course, complain when they finally got the chance. They wouldn't see the design until they got galley proofs. They wouldn't know the list price until they saw the catalog copy. It would be too late to make changes by the time they were aware of how unhappy they were.

I remember tense conversations with authors who claimed they couldn't lose a word of their prose. And I remember fielding even more-uncomfortable calls with those same authors after the book was published in tiny type at a price they couldn't afford. It was hard to render much sympathy. If they had written the book they had been contracted to write, a book that came in at the right size, everything would have been fine.

But still they complained. They tended not to carp to the editor who had given them the contract (and from whom they hoped to get another one). No, they whined to me. And they'd grouse to one another about how they were being screwed over by the press. "Yes, I know. Oxford's too big," was something I considered having printed on a T-shirt.

Indeed, size matters. Sometimes big is good. Just as, sometimes, small doesn't mean slight. As everyone knows, it's how you use what you've got. Yet when writers spends years working on something that means a lot, they want it to have some heft and bulk. No one wants a reviewer to refer to his opus as a "slim volume." But that doesn't mean you have to bulk it up to steroidal proportions to be taken seriously.

When I became an editor myself and was busy acquiring books, I let my authors get away with all manner of publishing sins, including prose bloat. At Oxford, I didn't have the time to spend cutting manuscripts and tended to think that my assistants, smart as they were, would not do a much better job than I had. At Duke University Press, we were fortunate to have extraordinary designers work on the interiors of the books, and sometimes they came up with creative solutions when projects ran overlong. Sometimes. The truth is, as an editor, I was already on to the next projects by the time manuscripts I'd acquired were put into production.

Very few tome-like books warrant their length. But if an author thinks it's important to her scholarship to include 15 examples that prove the same point, or if she can't cut four chapters tangential to her argument, how much can a fresh-out-of-college editorial assistant say? Scholarly books tend to have so many writing problems that size can be easily overlooked until it's time to run the numbers.

So it all comes down to the author. It's challenging to be a rigorous, ruthless critic of your own writing. By the end of a big project, the idea of looking at it again is torture. Often you will have memorized your own prose, thinking it as unchangeable as the King James Bible. Heaving the manuscript off your desk onto someone else's feels like a reward.

But if you're unwilling to do the pruning and paring, cutting and condensing, tightening and restructuring, no one else will. And then you may get what you deserve: a book that requires a magnifying glass to read, with a price that most people would rather spend on a decadent meal. Or, worse, you'll end up with a manuscript that no one will publish.

Oh, yeah, one last thing.

I would have written a shorter essay, but I didn't have the time.

Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane. Her Web site is http://www.racheltoor.com. She welcomes comments and questions directed to careers@chronicle.com.