Omission in Prose: What Writers Leave Out Between Words

My Reading Note

I once thought good writing had to spell out every crucial detail. Then I read a scene where nothing was said directly, yet I understood it completely. That was when I discovered how powerful omission can be in a story.

Prose style is built from many elements: diction, syntax, and figurative language, among them. When these elements work together, they create texture, which is the felt quality of language. Within texture there are six dimensions. The first article in this series examined density of language and how much meaning gets packed into a sentence. This one looks at the second dimension, omission.

Omission is one of the qualities that gives prose its texture. When writers leave things out, readers have to fill them in. This article looks at how omission works and why it matters in textured prose. For the full framework of texture as a prose style, see Texture as Element of Prose Style: How Language Feels.

What Omission Is

Omission refers to what writers choose not to say. A passage can leave out key details, skip over events, or let dialogue trail into silence. What is missing becomes part of the reader’s experience because the reader must supply it.

Omission is not the same as vagueness. While vague writing leaves the reader uncertain, omission leaves the reader active. The writer creates a space, and the reader steps into it.

The first time I noticed omission, I was reading a story where two characters argued about something that never got named. I spent pages trying to figure out what they were fighting about. Eventually I realized the writer wanted me to wonder.

Omission in Hemingway: The Battle That Never Comes

Here is a passage from Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925):

Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.” We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed.” We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.

The narrator describes marching toward the front, the drunken soldiers, the adjutant’s worry about a kitchen fire. What never appears is the battle itself. We see the approach, we hear the warnings, but the fighting happens somewhere off the page.

The omission is not a gap to be filled later. The battle never arrives because the narrator cannot speak of it. He describes everything around the event, and that avoidance becomes the subject. What is missing stays with the reader, felt more sharply than if it had been described directly.

Reading Hemingway taught me that what he leaves out matters as much as what he keeps in. I kept looking for what was missing until I understood he wanted me to notice it wasn’t there.

Omission in Poe: What the Cuts Reveal

Here is a passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” (1842), a story that exists in two versions. The shorter version omits material that appeared in the original:

And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, “This is indeed Life itself!” turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead!

What is omitted is everything that came before: the frame narrative of the wounded man seeking refuge, the extended description of the chateau, the history of the painting. Poe cut these elements to concentrate the story into its essential parts.

The omission makes the tale more powerful. Without explanation or backstory, the reader confronts the horror directly. The painter drains his wife’s life into the canvas, and we learn this in the same moment he does. By cutting away what surrounded the story, Poe let the story stand on its own.

I read both versions of “The Oval Portrait” side by side. The first time it was called “Life in Death” and had a long opening about the narrator taking opium and wandering into a chateau. The second version cut all that and went straight to the painting. The shorter one got to the point faster, and the point hit harder.

Omission in Whitehead: What the Reader Supplies

Here is a detail from Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) that appears across the entire novel rather than in a single passage:

The protagonist is named Mark Spitz. The name is the same as a white Olympic swimmer from the 1970s. The novel’s cover, its summary, and its early pages never mention the character’s race. Readers form their own picture. Later in the book, the reader learns that Mark Spitz is Black and that the nickname was a cruel joke from his childhood.

What was omitted—the character’s race from all paratextual material—affects the entire reading experience. Readers eventually realize they have been imagining someone based on their own assumptions. The omission becomes a trap that exposes those assumptions. The novel forces readers to confront what they supplied on their own.

I had a picture of Mark Spitz in my head the whole time I was reading Zone One. When I got to the end, I realized the book never gave me that picture. I made it up myself.

When Omission Does Not Work

Omission fails when it leaves the reader confused rather than engaged. A gap that asks something of the reader differs from a gap that simply withholds. The first requires the reader to participate; the second leaves the reader with nothing to hold onto.

In weaker writing, omission can feel like oversight. The writer leaves things out by accident, and the reader senses something missing without knowing what or why. The result is frustration rather than involvement.

I used to think good writing meant leaving nothing out. Now I think good writing means knowing what to leave in and letting the reader handle the rest.

In textured prose, omission functions as a kind of trust. The writer believes the reader will follow, will notice what is missing, and will step into the space left open. Effective omission gives the reader just enough to know that something is missing. The reader senses the absence and works to fill it. Ineffective omission leaves only empty space.

The next article in this series will examine the third dimension of texture, speed, and how sentences control the pace of reading. For the full framework, see Texture as Element of Prose Style: How Language Feels.

Writing Styles: Key Elements, Types, and Examples

Guide • 7 min read

Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory and the Art of Minimalist Writing

Explainer • 8 min read

Elliptical Sentence

Explainer • 4 min read

I picked these three articles from the archive because each one connects to omission in a different way. The guide to “Writing Styles” provides the basic terms for talking about prose style. The piece on “Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory” explains the writer who built his work around what he left out. And the article on the “Elliptical Sentence” shows how omission works at the sentence level, where words are missing but the meaning remains.