I am a newcomer to Haskell trying to manipulate data at the bit level. More specifically, I am trying to calculate a seven-bit value and a nine-bit value, concatenate the two values as a Word16, and put the result using putWord16. I know that this sounds weird (because it totally is), but it is required by the standard of a networking protocol that I am implementing. The byte seems to be the atomic unit in Haskell, but I need to go subatomic. Currently, I am storing the two values each as Word16s, bitshifting one of them left by nine (using shift in the Data.Bits module), and then adding the two. Is there a simpler and/or more elegant way of achieving this result?