Premise

Sometimes less is more—and such is the case with a topic we like to call “wordiness.” While being specific and elaborative are often good strategies to better expressing your ideas, sometimes such efforts can go overboard.

Why is this a problem? Writing is tricky in the sense that you want to try to strike a balance. Write too little, and readers might not grasp the full intentionality of your point; write too much, and we could lose the focus of what you’re trying to say within the mire of redundant adjectives and verbs.

You want the most important details to come across clearly. And so optimizing where and when to elaborate should always be a key consideration.

Examples

Just take a gander at a couple of examples:

• Probably too wordy: I have the fullest confidence in boldly stating—and with a magnanimously unfettered spirit of goodwill—that the most courageous efforts of my students to maintain a structured and genuinely engaged workload schedule in regards to their ongoing paper progress will absolutely be justly rewarded with appropriately representative final grades based upon their aforementioned corresponding efforts.
• Maybe not wordy enough: Good students equal good grades.

Both these sentences try to state the same idea in terms of student performance corresponding with final grading outcomes. But where the first one is almost confusing with the amount of descriptive clarification, the second one lacks the identifications for more specifically how and why we are talking about why these results might occur. So how do you decide how to edit these? Where is the “middle ground”?

The trick is to identify what you deem as “the essence” of the sentence. You can do this word-math in your head. But for the sake of example, we’ll transcribe such a process here:

• I am trying to explain and emphasize in a genuine way the fact that I really have noticed that students who genuinely try to stick to a schedule with working on their papers throughout the semester tend to get better grades by the end of it.

Obviously, this example above still sounds a little wordy. But that’s fine if we can really unpack your true meaning. From here, we can streamline all of this into legible written form:

• I’ve seen over the years that students who work on their papers by keeping to a schedule throughout the semester tend to end up with better letter grades.

Some of the differences in the example above here are subtle—but that’s exactly the skill you want to try to intuit. E.g. the phrase “I’ve seen over the years” implies that you genuinely believe this statement to be true based on your experience—which is a much clearer but still distinct version of the original version, “I have the fullest confidence in boldly stating—and with a magnanimously unfettered spirit of goodwill.”

Additionally, you can also ask whether you need some of these details from the original probably too wordy version too. E.g. is it necessary to identify that they “will most likely be justly rewarded with appropriately representative final grades”? Or does simply stating that they “tend to end up with better letter grades” imply that point anyways?

These are questions that only you can ask—and answer—but that’s exactly what you want to be considering!

Further Considerations

• It’s always a great idea to go back through your writing with these considerations in mind. Sometimes it takes writing out your thoughts in order to uncover the essence of what you’re trying to say.
• Reducing even minor elements of wordiness adds up over the course of any document. I.e. while one extraneous word or phrase might not “ruin” your writing, each additional one detracts from your work as otherwise being a more clear and compelling piece. Add up enough of these distractions, and your work runs the risk of not being nearly as impactful as you might think (and hope) it to be.
• A good practical tip is to read your work aloud. People often hate doing this for a variety of reasons. But trust us—and your own voice! It will help you hear awkward, redundant, and otherwise needless and confusing phrasing that you can then make changes to.
• Remember that what you do around sentences matters too. It’s not enough to edit an idea on its own. If you make a change in one spot, you need to consider if this adjustment contradicts or makes another statement elsewhere now appear wordy. This is also the reason why after makes all these individual changes, you have to go back through and reread the whole piece to make sure all your smart new alignments make sense!