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  • >> INSTRUCTOR: Alright, so now we're going to talk about something called wordiness.

  • 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!

>> INSTRUCTOR: Alright, so now we're going to talk about something called wordiness.

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