Keep it tight. That's one of the first things you learn at journalism college, writes Jeremy Clay. Don't waffle. A sentence should jab at the reader like a robot boxer in the 1970s Raving Bonkers toy. The shorter, the better. See?Happily, no-one troubled Mark Twain with such constraints. Here, for example, is a line from his travelogue, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. "The country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods,...
