How do you overcome excessive wordiness?
Wordiness decreases the readability of your content. What are some examples of difficult sentences and how do you set about fixing them?
Is there even such a thing as “too wordy”?
“Wait a moment,” you may be thinking, “isn’t it a good thing to display a decent vocabulary?” And you’d have a point. As grammar enthusiasts, we agree to an extent. It’s an excellent thing to use words sometimes that aren’t within the humdrum of everyday language. The English language is filled with rich and delightful words and phrases which may make a standard sentence extraordinary. Up to a certain point, it’s good to be wordy.
This doesn’t mean there’s not a line to be drawn. There’s a difference between showing creativity and merely trying to stuff your writing with synonyms to seem impressive. And chances are high that if you’re doing the latter, it’s obvious to your reader. this can be the opposite of plain language and conciseness, and there’s a word for it — verbosity.
Let’s check out some examples of this in writing and consider a more straightforward alternative.
Essays and wordiness
Essays are particularly susceptible to wordiness. Here’s a passage sourced from San Jose State University on the subject of pruning prose. They used the below as an example of wordiness:
There is currently a lively, ongoing controversy among many sociologists and other professionals who study human nature: theories are being spun and arguments are being conducted among them about what it means that so many young people — and older people, for that matter — who live in our society today are so very interested in stories about zombies.
According to Readable’s new ‘reach’ metric, this is only easily readable by 25% of the general public.
Not only is this paragraph one really long sentence — but it’s also self-indulgent in using more words than are needed to form the purpose. It also uses unnecessary qualifiers (so very) where a stronger adjective would do the trick.
This is how I might reword it:
A lively societal debate rages among the human sciences. The contentious issue is: why are so many people fascinated by zombie fiction?
The reach has shot up dramatically to 80% of the overall public. With just a few small changes! Among other tweaks, I’ve replaced ‘so very interested’ with ‘fascinated’. Using too many adverbs can slow your writing down, whereas employing a stronger adjective instead keeps your writing dynamic.
Redundant expressions
A redundant expression is another sort of wordy expression and it means you’re saying an equivalent thing twice to fill space.
For example, if you reference an ‘empty void’, you’re using a redundant expression, or ‘doublespeak’. A void is by its definition empty.
The synonymous or related words aren’t always right next to every other in redundant expressions. Here’s an example of a paragraph filled with doublespeak:
She opened the envelope, which contained a confidential document inside. After reading it with close scrutiny, she discovered it was written in the exact same handwriting as the mysterious note she’d received before; the reason she knew this was because of handwriting studies in her past history.
I’ve bolded the repetitions within the sentences phrases which make them superfluous and too wordy. Here’s the corrected version:
She opened the envelope, which contained a confidential document. After reading it with scrutiny, she discovered it was written in the same handwriting as the mysterious note she’d received before; she knew this because of handwriting studies in her past.
All you’ve got to try to do is identify where you’re using two synonymous words where one would do.
Passive phrases
The passive makes your writing look indirect and less trustworthy.
You’ll recognize the passive from any document you’ve ever read which tries to shift responsibility from the party in question and put a distance between themselves and therefore the action.
It refuses to get to the point and doesn’t add clarity to things it’s describing — sometimes this can be deliberate, and sometimes it’s a misguided plan to sound more intellectual.
Monzo is a great example of a company who are actively making an attempt to clarify their terms and conditions for their customers. rather than saying, “a refund will be given to you”, they assert “we’ll give you a refund” as a part of their tone guidelines.
By writing actively in their terms and conditions, they provide a robust and trustworthy impression.
Here’s a fast guide to active versus passive voice:
Go forth and edit!
Don’t forget that clarifying your content and cutting out the fluff isn’t about dumbing down your content. It’s about opening it up.
