How to avoid being too wordy
How do I avoid being wordy?
Do you know of any exercises or something similar to help with that?
I feel, when reading my own writing, that I use "expensive" language, as we say in Portuguese, way too often.
I don't seem to be able to use colloquial speech when writing tending to just put down the first expressions that come to my mind, which is much too often too... well, it sounds snobbish.
How do I break that bad habit?
Maybe I should worry about this at the time of editing?
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1 answer
It is the lure of the fine phrase. We all want to create fine phrases, phrases that are a thing of beauty in their own right. But the lure of the fine phrase can often lead us into the verbose and the excessively ornate.
There is nothing wrong with fine phrases. We should pull off a fine phrase whenever we can. But a fine phrase is not created by dressing an idea in finery. It is created by expressing an idea with startling economy. Most of the finest fine phrases don't contain a lot of obscure words (though the obscure word might be the most economical word in some cases), rather they put a set of ordinary words together in just the right way to capture the fullness of an idea.
Capturing the fullness of an idea is key here. It is easy to cut words out of sentence in the name of economy but often when we do that we are also cutting nuance and detail, so that we are doing less with less, rather than doing more or the same with less, which is true economy. A truly fine phrase does more with less.
So, the exercise is, can I say more with less. For any sentence you feel is too ornate or too verbose, ask yourself if you can say the same thing (all of it or more) with fewer simpler words. Often the truly fine phrase emerges from our attempts to prune back the excesses of our first attempt at a fine phrase. Sometimes an ordinary phrase is all the occasions demand. Fine phrases should say something pointed or poignant or remarkable. We don't need fine ways of saying mundane things.
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