INSTRUCTOR: Don't be overly wordy. You don't need to use twice as many words to say the same thing if a smaller number of words is going to be sufficient. So beware as you're writing. I think a lot of times when we think about academic writing, we think I have to sound smart, I have to put lots of words in there, I have to put lots of big words in there. That's not always the case. 

When you want to really engage your reader, you want to sound as if you know what you're talking about, most definitely, and you want to be evidence based and research based if you' are doing a research project, but you can do that in a very direct and concise way. You don't have to use extra words. 

So we have a few examples here. One thing that comes up with wordiness a lot are unnecessary words like "very" and "really." These not, only make your writing wordy, but they also give an emotional feel to your writing, and so you want to avoid putting any kind of emotion like that into your writing. While you may be passionate about the subject, you still want to maintain an objective, authorial distance as the author of the work. 

So instead of saying the teachers were very well informed, you could say that the teachers were well-informed as they illustrated by the lengthy discussion they had about English language learners. Here, we know why they were well-informed. It may be a little more words. It may actually have more words to describe something, but it is much more precise and specific. So instead of saying, the manager really understood his employees, could say, the manager understood his employees in depth, valuing them as people as well as employees. 

So again, you may actually use more words to be more specific, and that's OK, but it's definitely to your benefit to avoid any unnecessary words. And "very" and "really" are often used in that way. 

Also, circumlocution is another word that goes with wordiness. Talking about wordiness, that's very wordy, but it's really a way to say that you're talking around the point instead of getting to it. So in the example here, instead of saying that the woman was the patient, had lived 30 years, and was located in an area outside of New York City, but not far away, you could simply say the female patient was 30 years old and lived in a New York City suburb. You can see that there is a difference here. Instead of talking around the idea, just saying it directly is always the best way to go. It avoids that circular reasoning and those roundabout explanations. 

Redundancy is another thing that happens when we think about wordiness, and redundancy really just means unnecessary repetition. If you don't need to repeat it, don't. There's no need for it. So instead of repeating information, even if it's in the next sentence, it's just a good idea to be specific and try to group your information together in a way that all of the information related to a certain topic is all in one place. And then you don't have to go back and repeat unnecessarily. 

So you can see an example of this here where we talk about it says, as a counselor, it is important to have good listening skills for counseling patients, as good listening skills for counseling patients leads to better understanding of a patient, which as a counselor, is the entire purpose of a counseling session. You can see even in that example, the words "counselor," "listening skills," "good listening," "counseling" are repeated multiple times. And as a reader, I find that very difficult to articulate, even just reading it aloud. So again, being more precise and specific will definitely help there.