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LUDLUM

                                             January 17, 2015

The first sentence of Robert Ludlum's
"The Parsifal Mosaic" (1982):

   The cold rays of the moon streaked down
   from the night sky and bounced off the
   rolling surf, which burst into suspended
   sprays of white where isolated waves
   crashed into the rocks of the shoreline.

                                                  PARSIMONY
Point the first: this is a rather long and
clunky sentence.  Can you trim it?  Well yes,
actually there's a lot of redundant phrases
in it.  Where else would the moon's rays         (They might bounce
streak down from except the night sky?           off a car window or
                                                 something, I suppose,
Then there are cliches like "rolling surf"       but one would assume
the rolling action of waves could just be        the night sky unless
assumed, you could just say "surf".              told otherwise.)

Is there some point in specifing that
"isolated waves" crashed into the rocks?
Or reminding that these rocks were on the
shoreline?

We're left with:

   The cold rays of the moon streaked down and bounced
   off the surf, which burst into suspended sprays of
   white where waves crashed into the rocks.

One could go further of course, but I'd
like to presume that there's *some* reason
for all this verbiage-- maybe it was important
to the author to call the moon light "cold".

But myself, I might've just said:

   Moonlight reflected off of the surf,
   where waves crashed against the rocks.


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