Saturday, February 15, 2014

Everyday Thoughts From the Writing Center: Less is More!

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received from an English professor is that less is more. When it comes to writing a paper, especially a paper with a required word count, it is easy to get caught up in adding fluff. Adjectives are great, but when you begin to write sentences that just seem to go on forever in a continuous loop of just repeating the same information and ideas that are the same as the notions that you've continuously postulated over and over again ad infinitum in slightly different forms and casts and configurations and styles and modes and specific fashions, then it just turns into an endless loop of saying the same concepts and theories and erudition in an infinitely long loop of repetitious nonsense and extrapolation of the sort of same cerebration and excogitation that you've predicated previously that just begins to completely lose its meaning and context and imperative connotation and by the end of the sentence just ends up not making sense anymore to the point where it's absolutely impossible in any coherently justifiable way to efficaciously determine what it is that you were actually trying to say in the first place. Readers don't like that. Content is far more important than trying to sound smart by forcing vocabulary or by stretching sentences to the point of incoherence.

-Wes

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