Learning to write well is complicated and can be never-ending, as my own experience illustrates.

To do anything well you must do it a lot. I got tons of practice in middle school when my father worked in Japan. Mom encouraged me to write him weekly letters — not exactly literary masterpieces, but they gave me a lot of practice.

Teachers helped me learn to organize thoughts and get them on paper. Apparently I made some progress, because when I was graduating from college a professor told me he hoped that graduate school would not ruin my prose style!

But my most important writing lesson came after I taught at Adrian College for six years and was spending a sabbatical year at the Harvard Law School.

I had read a book which I considered a very well done piece of nonsense, but which raised fundamentally important questions. I contacted the American Political Science Review offering to review it.

The editors agreed and said to limit my article to 1,000 words. Since I had taken over 60 pages of handwritten notes and quotations from this book, this was a challenge.

I came up with a very tight draft of the review. Unfortunately, when I counted the words they came to nearly 2,000! This is when my most important writing lesson began.

For days, I combed through the article, seeking words that could be eliminated without undermining my discussion, and tallied up every deleted word. I found whole sentences that could be eliminated. There were places where one word could replace several words.

Sometimes I rewrote whole paragraphs to say the same thing more succinctly.

Finally, unable cut further, I counted the words and found they came to exactly 1,012! Figuring that the editors would not bother to double check, I mailed it in.

My wife, with two degrees in English and much more experience in writing, said it was the best thing I had ever written.

The American Political Science Review editors had a reputation for mercilessly rewriting everything, but they didn’t change anything in my article.

This ability to shorten rough drafts has been valuable since I began writing opinion columns, because editors generally prefer them short and to the point. Not uncommonly, I’ll have a draft of 800 words and have to prune it down to 650 — no great trick compared to what I had to do in 1970.

(The first draft of today’s article came to 784 words. I reduced it to 635.)

Reflecting on my experience, I wonder if teachers have the right idea when they require students to write papers that are at least so many pages or words long. Doesn’t this encourage bad writing?

Maybe teachers should limit how long papers can be. Of course sometimes they might want to continue long assignments in order to teach students how to organize a major paper. But they could evaluate these papers, then require students to cut out half the words and resubmit them.

Lifelong learning is not just a nice idea. Dewey B. Larson, who I met when he was in his 60s, had written several books starting a few years before we met. His first book was clearly written, but difficult to read. His later books were much better writen.

My discovery of the importance and difficulty of cutting out words was not original. In 1750 Benjamin Franklin wrote up a description of his electrical experiments for a member of the Royal Society in London. He apologized for the length of his report:

“I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”

Many other notable people , before and after Franklin, have agreed.

Try shortening something you have written, and see how it works for you.