See Advanced Grammar Checking in Action!
« Five Important Aspects Of Business Writing | Home | How To Write A Term Paper »
The Mistake Of Being Verbose
Many unseasoned writers often fall prey to the trap of verbosity – using too many words to express too little of an idea. Unless your goal is to write a requisite number of words, instead of successfully communicating with your audience, verbose prose is bad for business and should be avoided at all costs.
Here’s a good rule to help you break away from verbosity:
Don’t speak what you can communicate with a gesture. Don’t motion what you can express with a wink. Don’t wink what you can answer with a smile.
Verbosity is especially frowned upon when you are writing business documents. In a corporate environment where time equals money, few people have neither the time nor patience to read through rumbling text. As such, editing your document several times to trim the fat should help immensely.
- Run it through an English writing software to help identify unnecessary portions which can be eliminated without losing the central idea.
- Read through the material and start eliminating superfluous words.
- Pay special attention to adjectives that do not help the communication.
- If one sentence expresses the same idea as another, combine them into one.
A copy laden with too many unnecessary words is not only distracting, it’s irritating. Instead of spending the next five minutes understanding the message, it forces you to wade through a pile of words that do nothing for the experience. Avoid it at all costs!
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.