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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26214
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You said it yourself. When the reader cannot concentrate on the story because there are so many adjectives and adverbs, and other details and flourishes. Get other people to read your writing, and they will be able to easily comment on this.

You are also falling into having too much detail if every other word is an adjective or adverb. If you're describing every noun or verb with them, **stop it.** It's really bad and will lead to the thing I said above. Here's an example:

> I furiously knocked on the brown oak door, and impatiently waited for my annoying brother to finally arrive.

That sentence is a little extreme but I have seen things like it in the past. There are many things which would be implied by the story (even though we don't have a 'story' in this example). We can pick out some unnecessary descriptions:

- The brother is annoying. We don't need to describe that because the protagonist would only be furiously knocking on the door if the brother had been doing something bad/annoying.

- The brown oak door. This is really unnecessary. I don't need to be reminded of what a door looks like, it's one of those things you can leave for the reader to imagine. However, if there's a special door, you can describe it. For example, a door with spikes on.

- Impatiently and finally. Impatiently is already implied, and if you wanted to further show this, you could perhaps write another sentence about him doing something impatient. Finally is just completely unnecessary and you don't really need it. It adds an extra not-needed adverb to the sentence.

I think that the amount of detail depends on the author though. It's very difficult to know if you're using too little or too much. So what I would advise is: use your peers to your advantage! Go onto a site like [Critique Circle](http://www.critiquecircle.com/) and get it critiqued.

Original score: 16