What is wordiness? This is what happens when writers

use more words than are necessary in order to make the point.

It's usually a stylistic issue but it can be problematic when it interferes

with the reader's ability to understand what it is you're trying to say.

How can you tell if your writing is too wordy?

Well, like I said, wordiness is relative, but bottom line:

your writing is too wordy if it is difficult for the reader to understand.

Let's look at the following two sentences. In the first one:

"The manager wanted to maintain the working group's efficiency.

To do that, she called the entire team to a meeting to make a review

of what each individual member had contributed during the previous two weeks."

Okay, that's a mouthful, and it's two sentences to say the same thing.

We have repetition. There's just a lot of words going on.

Let's look at the revision: "To maintain the team's efficiency,

the manager called a meeting to review each member's contributions

during the previous two weeks."

Even the flow there is a little bit better because you've gotten rid of all the extra

words.

If you're having trouble identifying wordiness in your own writing,

just ask someone else to read it and look for the wordiness.

Is wordiness always wrong?

No, the number of words that a writer uses is very much a matter of style.

What's considered wordy in one genre or situation is going to be

considered too brief in another.

So as a writer, it is your job to be aware of the rhetorical requirements of your writing.

Now, what are some common types of wordiness?

Well, you have vague descriptions that dance around the point.

In other words, you have a lot of different ways of saying something

and you never really say what you mean.

Redundancy is a big problem, especially with adverbs and adjectives.

You don't need to say "the whole, entire world."

We get it--you can say "the whole world" or "the entire world".

We don't need whole and entire; they mean the same thing.

Or you might have some over-reliance on negative constructions.

Rather than saying "He was not sympathetic," just say

"He was unsympathetic."

Have you ever had a sentence where you had to decipher the "not"s?

Like "He was not not unkind"? What does that mean?

There's too many bouncing back and forth there.

So if you have an over-reliance on negative constructions,

that's a wordiness issue.

You might have a lot of hedging or qualifying.

Things like "generally" "basically" "sort of" "kind of"

you usually don't need those words.

Or you might have some wordy phrases: "in order to" "the reason was because"

"on account of"--all those are just extra words that don't need to be there.

Occasionally you might run into passive constructions with a dummy subject:

your sentence might start with "it is" or "there are" or "it may be that"

Usually those words are empty words that you can get rid of

and the sentence will be a lot stronger.

Now, none of these issues is wrong; it's just that these types of things

lead to wordiness that get in the way of your reader understanding your meaning.

So, how can you revise your wordiness?

Well first of all, wait a while before you revise.

Get some distance from your writing, because if you finish typing a paper

and then you go back and start trying to revise,

you will read what you think you wrote, not what you actually wrote.

So that's why distance--give yourself 5 minutes, get up, walk around,

do something else before you come back and then when you do,

you will start to see those sections that are unnecessarily wordy.

Now, another way that you can revise wordiness is to combine the sentences.

So if we take that first sentence, we can make these two sentences one.

So that's one way to shorten up your word count.

What's another way?

Well, you can get rid of this verb plus object combination

and just replace it with a single verb.

So that will shorten it up for you, too.

Another thing you can do is to get rid of some of those long phrases

and just replace them with a single noun.

Like we have "the working group's efficiency". Do I need "working group"?

Can't I just call them a team?

So that's one other way to shorten up your writing and get rid of wordiness.

Moving on, always delete those unnecessary words.

"In order to" usually is unnecessary; just say "to".

And then we've got the rest of the sentence.

So this is much shorter and cleaner than the previous sentences.

So just remember your overall purpose in writing.

When it comes to wordiness, sometimes less really is more!