Verbosity

Before

After

As a freshman in high school, I learned that when it comes to writing, less is more. At the time I loved to throw in as many impressive adjectives and clauses as possible, and while I didn't use a thesaurus, with my mindset, I may as well have. Even now, I know I still have a problem with using too many words. Proofreading can usually catch this, but for informal writing, such as on One Iris, I let it slip sometimes, and for that I apologize.

Recently, I've been assigned some rather dense articles for my coursework. As I spent hours pouring over these readings, I couldn't help but despair.

They're just plain bad at conveying information sometimes.

While I admit it's certainly possible that my reading level is just not as high as these academic elites, shouldn't good writing be able to convey one's ideas to as wide an audience as possible? What's the point of such robust vocabulary and advanced (but barely passable) sentence lengths? If the reader gets confused along the way, it's just not good writing.

The images above come from one article that I found to be very wordy and annoying to read, especially for an introductory paragraph. I spent a minute copying it into a word document and cutting it down to see if there was a better way to present the information. I cut down the size by 25% easily. The paragraph on the right captures the same information in a much more succinct way.

Let's consider another example from a rather terrible (in terms of verbosity) article I just read. Here's the first sentence:

"If 'emotion' is taken to mean 'an emotion,' 'a bounded sequence of anger, sadness, fear, and so forth (which are the sorts of events I will for the most part be considering here), rather than some more abstract or derivative usage, than it has not been of central concern in anthropology until recently."

An article full of such language gets extremely tiresome very quickly. Consider the following revision:

"Emotion as a bounded sequence of anger, sadness, and so forth has not been the central concern of anthropology until recently."

It took just a few seconds to come up with this revision, but it conveys the exact same idea in half the words. Why is "rather than some more abstract or derivative usage" even there? Shouldn't such a vague idea be elaborated on in another sentence, or even a separate paragraph? And the parenthesis... Given that you're starting this article by talking about this definition of emotion, I know that you're going to be talking about it, and not the "abstract" usage. These simple omissions improve clarity by leaps and bounds, and really I wish more academic authors took the time to proofread their articles readability.

I understand that this is a pretty silly rant, but it has definitely become a pet peeves lately and I felt compelled to write about it. For my fellow students, please do not adopt verbosity. "Short and sweet" doesn't apply to everything. But when it comes to information transfer, less really is more.