by Lucy E. Zahnle

Created on: October 23, 2009

Verbosity, the tendency to use more words or grander words than necessary to convey an idea, can be a demon for some writers. An author's writing "voice" is often an extension of the way the author speaks. If you use a lot of unnecessary words when you talk or if you are not confident in your writing and fear that readers won't understand your message, you may have a tendency to include extra, empty, or redundant words. Because you are comfortable with verbosity in your conversation, you may find it difficult to recognize verbosity in your writing.

Four common types of verbosity are wordiness, tautology, pleonasms, and the use of empty words or phrases. Of the four, wordiness is often the hardest to spot. Whereas verbosity in its purest form may involve the overuse of adjectives or the inclusion of grandiose words to pad out a piece or make it sound more erudite or important than it really is, wordiness is simply using more words than needed to express an idea, image, or action. You create a wordy sentence if you write the sentence in an awkward, confusing, overlong way. Here is an exaggerated example:

She reached the fingers of her hand that was on her left side out to stroke the fur of the cat, which opened its mouth to say, "Meow," and it stretched out the claws on its paws and kneaded the cushions made of velvet that covered the sofa that sat in the living room.

Here's how the revised, less wordy sentence would read:

She reached her left hand out to stroke the cat's fur as it meowed and kneaded its claws in the velvet cushions of the living room sofa.

You could make this passage even smoother and less wordy by creating two sentences:

She reached her left hand out to stroke the cat's fur. It meowed and kneaded its claws in the velvet cushions of the living room sofa.

Another form of verbosity, tautology, occurs when the same idea is repeated in different ways in one sentence. For instance, if you say "2 A.M. in the morning," you have created a tautology because "A.M." and "in the morning" mean the same thing. Another example would be "The townsfolk paid an annual tax every year." Since both "annual" and "every year" mean the same thing, they are redundant. To correct this redundancy, you need to choose either "annual" or "every year," and delete the phrase you did not select. Use one or the other, but not both.

A pleonasm occurs when a writer expands on a clear idea by adding already understood details or presents a long, involved phrase to impart something

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