Wordiness is a Curse
Because excessive Verbosity and Impatience both are deadly sins of writing
In the process of writing, I often have to ask myself “When Is Sentence Structure Too Sophisticated?”
“When do I need to stop trying to sound too smart in comparison to all the other, better, articles and books, and can any ideas I have be expressed in a simple form?”
It’s a real issue that can be prevalent in many people’s works I believe, since there is a difference (albeit one that many people don’t distinct too well) between a smart idea and smart sentence structure. In other terms, when does something count as being faux intelligence, falsely profound?
The Lexile Scale
If, like me, you were familiar with the library as a child, then the frustration of being told you couldn’t rent out a certain book because its lexile was “too high for your age” is probably prominent in your memories of trying to challenge your intelligence.
Minimum word counts were also probably equally irritating, as they required you to write out your ideas in a way that is hopelessly boring; in a way that would make sure no one ever read them. In this case, needlessly enforcing the lexile scale only served to hurt the writing process.
Lexile, at face value, is intended to be able to rank books in terms of their complexity, and be able to recommend books for age groups that would be able to actually comprehend them.
The problem with this scale is that it mainly relies on the sentence structure of the book, rather than the complexity of the ideas it presents.
While this works at first for children’s books (since they necessarily need to have simple sentence structure in order for children to understand them) this means that past 900 lexile, there seems to be no discernable pattern between the complexity of a book’s sentence structure, and the idea which it presents.
This has ultimately given birth to the problem of incredibly saturated sentence structure simply to fluff up a book’s “literary value.”
When written in this way, there is no way for the lexile scale to accurately apply to the book, and I find it’s often aggravating (at least to me) to read a book that reeks of someone trying to type out quadrisyllabic words not to describe some important niche topic, but simply for the sake of wishing to sound smart.
This mark of bad writing is unfortunately somewhat pervasive: a stream-of-consciousness that is designed only to sound smart is common on the internet nowadays, and it’s often paired with no actually interesting message within the wall of text.
Someone repeating their words and arguments in this way simply… sounds smart.
They usually cannot be smart if they only do this, since a good debater can make their points quickly and efficiently, but this way of speaking is one that is ultimately far too common
Persuasive Power
The prime marker of intelligence used to be the ability to speak English well; to know the intricate ins-and-outs of any language, and then be able to express the most complex of your ideas.
While this still is a worthwhile skill, this has become somewhat outdated due to the amount of people who are able to pretend they know things because they’re good at language.
I need not tell the reader that this isn’t true, but it’s pervasive now on a scale which hasn’t been ever seen.
I believe that this is the main reason that most online writing on Medium and other such platforms is geared towards simpler language — the simpler the idea, the simpler language needs to be to transmit the idea, and the plague of persuasion is avoided.
Now, it should be apparent that I do not agree with this idea — for one, richer language allows for further development of the idea in less time and words, but that point notwithstanding, it’s easy to see why many authors write in such a way when this problem is common.
Disarming the reader with a simple article to read not only makes someone who has a short attention span (which is ridiculously common on the Internet) more likely to read your article, but more patient readers will instead be more receptive to the message.
I think it’s because the simplicity of the language makes people subconsciously believe that you’re just making a dumber point, so it works as a mechanism to figuratively pierce the reader with your message.
So, if the next time you write, you’re similar to me and bloat a piece to 1800+ words of fluff, make sure that you take the time to read through — and maybe you’ll realize that Verbosity isn’t always Intelligence.
