"Verbosity is the product of making a text verbose, a process which is the exact opposite of being concise. A verbose text is one that has a larger than necessary amount of words, usually the inflation being due to a higher number of adjectives. Verbose texts tend to be more descriptive, but at the cost of blurring the information, to the point where excessively verbose texts have only description, and are often unreadable."
— Wikipedia
Who thinks a journalist should try to be verbose? Certainly not I.
I believe anyone reading the paper deserves to understand what's going on and not think, "Wow, I must be stupid because I don't understand a word of that."
It is for you, dear readers, and for newspaper browsers everywhere, that I risked my job today and refused to throw bonus long words into my stories.
I do have to admit I was tempted to clutter up my writing and make it incomprehensible and see how they liked that.
But the thought makes me ill.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
the subtext, of course, is this:
"we are a smalltown paper in bumfuck, nowheresville, and therefore, not much of any import or interest occurs.
in order that we can sell more advertising, thereby increasing revenue, we need you to fill your articles with much more unnecessary crap, thus, they will be longer, requiring more pages, meaning more space for half page, quarter page, sidebar ads, etc."
commerce is a bitch, ain't it, sis?
Aww. I like you guys.
I will refrain from commenting, except to say that perhaps we could start selling dictionaries along with the newspaper.
Post a Comment