Prose & StyleIntermediate
Compression
The amount of meaning carried per unit of language.
Principle
Compression is not brevity; it is density without loss.
Takeaways
- Strong compression survives slow reading.
- Compression that demands too much produces opacity.
- Compression rises and falls deliberately across a work.
Overview
Compression is the density of meaning per sentence — how much character, world, theme, or feeling is packed into the prose. Poetry is the limit case; the strongest fiction borrows from it without becoming it.
Examples
- A sentence that names the marriage, the betrayal, and the season at once.
- An opening line that loads the entire premise into a clause.
- A description in which the object also indicts.