[martinjacobd]

I wish I understood what "wordiness" means. Perhaps it's restating the same simple point three times in as many loose sentences.

People who harp on this point usually point to the writing of Hemingway and similar writers (Carver comes to mind). All of these men are better writers than I am, but I still prefer to read Nabokov. Could Nabokov have "made his point" in fewer words? Almost certainly, but I wouldn't have enjoyed them any more.

[kshacker]

Hmmm, let's demonstrate wordiness :)

> I wish I understood what "wordiness" means. Perhaps it's restating the same simple point three times in as many loose sentences.

Does wordiness mean restating the same simple point three times in as many loose sentences?

> People who harp on this point usually point to the writing of Hemingway and similar writers (Carver comes to mind). All of these men are better writers than I am, but I still prefer to read Nabokov. Could Nabokov have "made his point" in fewer words? Almost certainly, but I wouldn't have enjoyed them any more.

People who complain about wordiness point to Hemingway and Carver. I personally find it a joy to read Nabokov despite his wordiness, and I do not think my reading enjoyment is related to being wordy.

* Sorry about this, thought I will have some fun. This is not chatGPT, just my own effort, and both your para and my para does not call out whether Hemingway is wordy or concise !!

[woolion]

>I personally find it a joy to read Nabokov despite his wordiness, and I do not think my reading enjoyment is related to being wordy.

> [original:] Could Nabokov have "made his point" in fewer words? Almost certainly, but I wouldn't have enjoyed them any more.

This sentence is a great example of how the main semantics of the sentence are actually the same but their subtext are entirely different. In both cases, the main point is that GP concludes that 'reading enjoyment is not correlated to wordiness'.

But in the first case, Nabokov is enjoyable despite the wordiness, whereas in the original it sounds more like it's an important part of the charm; reducing it would not improve enjoyment, and probably reduce it. It is almost opposite.

As an aside I think it's quite a dumb rule. If wordiness is bad, you'd get maximum enjoyment from a summary. Wordiness should be correlated in a more complex way to what is being told, the impression it should make, and the place within the narrative flow.

Another aside, the ChatGPT version (much more respectful of semantics, but barely more concise): Those who emphasize this often refer to writers like Hemingway and others such as Carver. While these writers are more skilled than me, I still favor reading Nabokov. Could Nabokov have expressed his idea more succinctly? Likely, but I wouldn't have found it more enjoyable.

[sosull]

Book hack: some lengthy autobiographies have an ‘about the author’ section on the inside cover.

[stewbrew]

I don't think you got the last sentence right.

I once noticed that people who are used to quickly read tons of texts often don't get the meaning of more winded sentences right. (I assume chatgpt would have the same issue.) But the fault was mine of course, since I did not distinguish between texts written to convey information and "literary" texts written for amusement.

In the age of LLMs it makes you wonder though, if all this writing advice isn't out of date. Concise texts are for AIs, wordy texts are for humans.

[martinjacobd]

touche :)

[eliotSplyt]

This is hilarious

[jfoutz]

I went to a small show the other day, and was thinking about how tough it is to package up that feeling. An audio recording or a video or photograph can capture some, kinda. Sort of a sad shadow of the real thing.

Writing is the only thing I could think of that could come close to evoking the feeling. Clearly, you wouldn't hear the songs, but the feeling is so hard to convey any other way.

Hemingway's voice is good for telling the kinds of stories Hemingway liked to tell. I've started Lolita, but never quite got around to finishing it.

I think, for some ideas, the only hope of communicating them is through writing, and trying to connect them to shared ideas. Some writers have a very lush style because they write lush stories.

I'm not an English major, I don't have a lot of tools for critical analysis of books. But I read Snowcrash about a dozen times. It gets a lot of criticism, I think, because it's a weird disjointed set of short stories, each featuring a neat idea, that are all kind of related. I love that book. It's like each section is a facet of an intricate gemstone. Slowly, over many reads, I finally put together the connections and the relationships.

We're pretty good at gathering up and packaging drama and comedy to sell soap. Deeper stories, more complex relationships, more complex environments are so hard to capture, much less convey to a message reciever. some messages require a lot of work to understand. They're not so good for selling soap.

in general, sure, be tight with writing. But sometimes you need those apparently superfluous words to really draw the reader into the world, or the experience. I think, at least in part, the work of the reader helps drive that emotional link.

[tetha]

Here you need to start considering the goal of the text and different tools work for different kinds of work. With Diataxis[1] in mind:

In a non-fiction reference style document, neither repetition nor wordy descriptions have a place. Repetition in such a document always risks inconsistency, redundancy and breeds confusion for the reader. That's very much not good.

In a guide or educational material, repetition gains a function. If the document is supposed to teach, repetition from different point of view increases retention and anchors the new knowledge better, by placing it in more contexts. In a guide, repetition can act as beneficial redundancy - re-checks of work for example.

In a fictional work, it's a style of writing. Some modern authors for example vary the wordiness or terseness to signify the overall sense of alarm and pressure on the character. Like, if nothing is going on, they spend words on just showing how everything is good for the character at the moment - smells of the coffee, the sun with a light breeze, how you either smell the flower shop to the left or the spice shop to the right, how there's a dog running after a bee. It's a lot of words with very little progress, but that's how a peaceful sunday morning in a cafe is.

And once the dramatic action starts, they switch to a much terser style. Suddenly, only a few things matter. The weight of a weapon on arms, the recoil in a shoulder, cover, screams, the path to regroup.

This ends up being a matter of writing style and reading taste. For example, it was too much for me in some parts of Tolkiens works.

[1]https://diataxis.fr/

[fasterik]

It's a lot more obvious in academic writing and other non-fiction. Using a lot of big words to make a simple point is often a sign that the writer is trying to signal intelligence rather than convey information.

In literature the goals are different, but I still think the rule applies in most cases. Nabokov is the exception that proves the rule. Great writers have earned the right to be wordy. When an average writer tries write like Nabokov, we call it purple prose.

[watwut]

> Nabokov is the exception that proves the rule. Great writers have earned the right to be wordy. When an average writer tries write like Nabokov, we call it purple prose.

When an average writer tries write like Hemmingway, the prose is boring and unreadable. It reads like highschool summary report of the story rather then story.

Also, in non-fiction, writers who use the shortest possible way to express things are super hard to read. Meantime, writers who use more space are often much easier to understand.

[bitwize]

We see this today in movies. Whatever his faults, Joss Whedon is a damn good writer. But today we have a surfeit of inferior writers who make their characters sound "quippy" in imitation of Whedon and these characters become fatiguing to watch.

[jprete]

I mostly agree with you. But I think great writers have, instead, earned the skill of when and how to be wordy for desired effect.

[readthenotes1]

Wordiness, in the fantasticly useful advice I am quite frequently accustomed to receiving in the rare and unusual (I cannot go so far as to say unique though that is nearly as a tick to a dog true) circumstances that have led me to receiving others thoughts on my quite elegant prose might be characterized as inserting too many brilliantly (to the astute author) descriptive adverbs and adjectives that somehow impede the understanding normal dull attention deprived reader.

Also: using more words that fewer

[martinjacobd]

I guess I just don't see sentences like this, even from novice writers.

[readthenotes1]

I don't see sentences like this, even from novices.

For example:)

Btw, Stephen Brust has a series of books whose authorial tone is explicitly wordy, and he makes it work.

[matwood]

I recently read Smart Brevity and it had a number of tips to deal with wordiness.

Use simple words and be direct.

[JackFr]

The problem is most people aren’t Nabokov.

(And Nabakov as a poet, translator of poems and expert on prosody was very, very good at writing fluidly - he could afford to be wordy.)

[watwut]

They are not Hemmingway either.

[grey-area]

These rules are for students writing essays, not Nabokov.

[martinjacobd]

That makes sense. I clearly didn't read the paratext closely enough :)

[TheOtherHobbes]

Literary wordiness is conscious use of language for poetic effect. It's fine in certain kinds of fiction if you can make it work. (Harder than it looks.)

Outside of literature, wordiness is usually an attempt to appear formal, archaic, and authoritative. It tries to introduces a difference in distance and status, and often comes across as pompous.

Simple examples: "utilise" for "use" "refrain from [doing the thing]" for "not [do the thing]", "I am minded to" for "I will/might."

A lot of business writing, some tech writing, and many scientific papers are unnecessarily wordy.

"Whether adults with obesity can achieve weight loss with once-weekly semaglutide at a dose of 2.4 mg as an adjunct to lifestyle intervention has not been confirmed."

Which really just says "We gave our volunteers this dose of this drug but nothing much happened."

That's a little exaggerated, and papers without the wordiness probably wouldn't pass peer review.

But still.

[dbtc]

Wordiness is inefficiency but some things are better left unoptimized.

[personjerry]

When you're a beginner it's important to know the rules. Then as you develop your style you can decide which rules to break.

[Denote6737]

To understand wordiness read any of Dickens with the fact he was paid based on the length of the book. Not the sales.

He will describe, in excruciating detail, the inconsiquential aspects of a one time characters outfit.

[wizofaus]

He's hardly the only author from that period given to what today would be considered extravagantly verbose prose. Lots of things were different about that age - arguably the typical readers of a Dickens or Bronte novel wouldn't have the exposure to the variety of experiences we take for granted these days, and intricate descriptions of seemingly inconsequential details were their equivalent of the saturation of the senses we now get from TV/cinema etc. And remember he was also capable of sentences like "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"...which is about as succinct and powerful you can get given the complexity of what he was describing.

[GoblinSlayer]

I could use that. I recently read a novel that had a secondary character - incorporeal being - but it had no description of appearance. Aaaargh. How I should see it?

[pratio]

I used to believe that too, but that's not the case it seems. https://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/faq/by-the-word.html

[jprete]

One way to see wordiness:

When you’re speaking, whatever your thoughts are have to come in the order that you think them, because people are used to being interrupted and therefore don’t want to stop talking to pick the right wording. So they say things in a very long way, just as they thought of them, in a disorganized jumble not dissimilar to this paragraph.

Writing, however, can be edited to make points clearly, without irrelevant detail, and logically ordered.

[weaksauce]

https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/centers/writing/seven-sin... provides a bit more context and example.

remove the words that don't add to the meaning of the sentence. that aside, this is in an academic setting and not prose where the rules are not hard and fast.

[harperlee]

Several of the changes both in that article (“The reason that General Lee invaded…”) and in other examples from this topic take out relevant information from the reader about emphasis of what’s being said.

Perhaps (theory just concocted!) taking these helpers out puts more effort on the reader, thus putting the text on a higher relationship of authority with the reader, and that makes it seem “stronger” writing!

[martinjacobd]

I can get behind this. Interesting that all three examples provided are improved by removing a "to be" verb. Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

[GuB-42]

> This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

I'd say that wordiness is when you can remove words from a story without taking away something of value from it, like clarity, pacing or flavor.

[PakG1]

Writing tips in OP seem great for certain types of nonfiction writing. Are the most prominent works of Hemingway and Nabokov (and Carver) fiction or nonfiction? Why are we treating fiction and nonfiction writing styles as having similar goals or needing similar advice?

[sacado2]

Rules that apply to non-fiction (what I guess Hamilton is after) usually doesn't really apply to fiction. Those rules make sense (kinda) for non-fiction, but I would certainly not apply them blindly to write fiction.

[HumblyTossed]

Don't read much Stephen King, do you?

I jest. But seriously...

[raincole]

Tell ChatGPT to rewrite your article. See why it's output is longer than the original text. That's wordiness.

[nicbou]

Try reading a few pages of Marx's writing. It's unbearable.

[thiagoharry]

I think Das Capital is ok, at least volume 1. And the communist manifesto was also an ok reading. His other writtings, however are far more difficult to read. But if you think they are unbearable, stay away from Hegel.