From Wilson Follett (1966), Modern American Usage (ed. Jacques Barzun)

Wherever we can make twenty-five words do the work of fifty, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish, and by reducing the span of attention required we increase the force of the thought. To make our words count for as much as possible is surely the simplest as well as the hardest secret of style. Its difficulty consists in the ceaseless pursuit of the thousand ways of rectifying our mistakes, eliminating our inaccuracies, and replacing our falsities — in a word, editing our prose. When we can do this habitually (even though it never becomes easy) we shall find ourselves honoring the faculty that can do more toward this end than a mastery of prescriptive grammar, more than the study of etymology and semantics, more than an observance of idiom and the maxims of rhetoric. And what is this faculty? It is the blessing of an orderly mind.