I used to frame conciseness as a technical skill. Cut the clutter, tighten the prose, respect the word limit. And it is those things. But somewhere along the way I started framing it differently in workshops, and the framing stuck: concision is an act of empathy toward your reader.
The version I use in the grant writing workshops goes like this. Your reviewer is reading your SSHRC proposal at 9 PM on a Tuesday. They’ve read fifteen proposals that day. They are tired. They are evaluating work outside their sub-field. They are looking for clear signals of feasibility and significance, and they do not have the energy to excavate your meaning from a thicket of text.
When you understand that fatigue, you realize that conciseness isn’t just a stylistic preference or a box to check on a rubric. It’s about respecting someone’s finite attention. White space on a page is a gift to the reader. When you remove the barriers to understanding, you let the reviewer focus their energy on evaluating your ideas rather than deciphering your sentences.
This reframe changes how students approach revision. “Make it shorter” feels like losing something. “Make it easier for a tired person to see your point” feels like gaining something. The work is the same, cutting nominalizations, unstacking noun phrases, trimming hedge words, but the motivation is different, and the motivation matters because it determines whether someone actually does it.
I notice the same principle running through all my workshops, not just the grant ones. In journal article revision, the question is always: can a reviewer say yes to this? In paraphrasing, the question is: are you making the source do work for your reader, or are you making your reader do work to figure out why the source is there? In all of these, the underlying move is the same. You are shifting from writer-centered prose to reader-centered prose, and that shift is fundamentally about caring whether the person on the other end can follow you.