Synonyms of "verbosity" include wordiness, verbiage, loquacity, garrulousness, logorrhea, prolixity, grandiloquence, expatiation, sesquipedalianism, and overwriting.
[7] Overwriting is a simple compound of the English prefix "over-" ("excessive") and "writing", and as the name suggests, means using extra words that add little value.
One rhetoric professor described it as "a wordy writing style characterized by excessive detail, needless repetition, overwrought figures of speech, and/or convoluted sentence structures.
[12] A Democratic leader, William Gibbs McAdoo, described Harding's speeches as "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.
[14] In The King's English, Fowler gives a passage from The Times as an example of verbosity: The Emperor received yesterday and to-day General Baron von Beck....
It may therefore be assumed with some confidence that the terms of a feasible solution are maturing themselves in His Majesty's mind and may form the basis of further negotiations with Hungarian party leaders when the Monarch goes again to Budapest.
[15]Fowler objected to this passage because The Emperor, His Majesty, and the Monarch all refer to the same person: "the effect", he pointed out in Modern English Usage, "is to set readers wondering what the significance of the change is, only to conclude that there is none."
[17] For instance, William Strunk, an American professor of English advised in 1918 to "Use the active voice: Put statements in positive form; Omit needless words.
[19] Contrary to Fowler's criticism of several words being used to name the same thing in English prose, in many other languages, including French, it might be thought to be a good writing style.
suggest that both concision and clarity are important: Elements that do not improve communication should be removed without rendering a style that is "too terse" to be clear, as similarly advised by law professor Neil Andrews on the writing and reasoning of legal decisions.
"[25] Similarly Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), the 1954 Nobel laureate for literature, defended his concise style against a charge by William Faulkner that he "had never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary.
"[27] George Orwell mocked logorrhea in "Politics and the English Language" (1946) by taking verse (9:11) from the book of Ecclesiastes in the King James Version of the Bible: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.and rewriting it as Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.In contrast, though, some authors warn against pursuing concise writing for its own sake.
Literary critic Sven Birkerts, for instance, notes that authors striving to reduce verbosity might produce prose that is unclear in its message or dry in style.