Brevity

I'm reading Strunk and White's The Elements of Style to freshen up on my writing/usage rules and skills. This passage was nice:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer makes all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Easier said than done, Strunk and White.