Verbosity

Verbosity is one of my sins.

Given that at least one of the posts here already is approximately equivalent in length to a 3-page double-spaced essay, and that I put it together over the course of a couple hours, I suppose that's already obvious.

It's an old sin of mine - not so much for sheer length, as I have been known to switch fonts to bump a paper from seven pages to eight (Arial is much more forgiving than Times New Roman to an undergraduate prone to procrastination), but especially for sentence length. When your English teacher is diagramming your sentences in the margins to parse them, you know you probably have a problem. Four-line sentences are another clue that you should probably tighten up, if not your phrasing, at least your punctuation. Semi-colons and dashes are my friends.

One of the professors I studied under for my history M.A. helped to some extent; she assigned a lot of two-page papers. Getting your point across in two pages will force you to cut out a lot of words. Just being aware of the "there is/are" construction and cutting that down actually pares out a lot of dead wood and frees up space in the allotted two pages for the words that actually say something. Grammar is generally not an issue. I may have occasional small, technical errors, but if I do something that looks ungrammatical, I probably did it on purpose.

No, most of the questionable things in my writing are stylistic, and I get stubborn about some of them. Prepositions at the end of the sentence? I'm not going to move it and pop a which/whom into the middle of a sentence, since it will probably interrupt the sentence flow and usually doesn't change whether or not the sentence makes sense. And if the 'in which' construction makes more sense in the sentence, I'm probably going to use it in the first place.

Yes, I've read Strunk & White. Not until the history M.A., mind you, despite having bought it off and on during my undergraduate. I don't particularly like Strunk & White - or rather, The Elements of Style. (Not particularly fond of spiders, either.) Some of the style issues are rather pointless and don't necessarily improve the prose they're applied to.

No, I take my grammatical underpinnings from a solid elementary education (comma flip charts in first grade - sometimes it seems like I'm the only one who actually got anything out of them) and constant reinforcement all the way up through high school. (The intensive grammar component of my senior year was probably redundant, though.) My style is an amalgamation of the summation of my reading and learning, though. Getting rid of it would be disingenuous and possibly detrimental. (Tweaking it probably isn't bad, such as trying to excise all the "there is/are" constructions, but I'm not going to scrap all my habits.)

Parentheticals are part of the sin of verbosity. Seriously, cut out all the asides and see how much is left. My non-fiction is inherently conversational, which makes keeping a diary difficult, since I subconsciously assume an audience, and as soon as I do that, some level of self-censorship creeps in, and on another level, the writing becomes toned to entertain. I haven't been able to keep a diary since high school, back when I was all angsty and pissed off without an outlet besides writing.

So I have parentheticals, tangents, qualifying words (count how often I've used "probably" so far - that seems to be the word I'm stuck on today). Perhaps not surprisingly, most of these problems apply only to my non-fiction prose. (Does that imply I write non-fiction verse? I don't recall ever doing so...) Bloated prose is one problem; extraneous exposition is another. For example: The story flagged #140 over on my works list wasn't really mapped out beforehand, and in the course of meeting new characters, the same background story has gotten explained something like four times. Entirely extraneous and very badly needs to be revised, but an entirely different problem from my non-fiction.

Hey, look. Two-page essay.