Newsflash! An epidemic plagues the UCF campus as we speak, and it may be permeating your esteemed writing habits. Have people been looking at you funny as you articulate your verbiage? Has your writing professor made your essay look like an impressionist collage of red ink? The symptoms of wordiness have likely begun to infect your command of the English language, yet fear not. A nurse may not be able to help you, but a dedicated grammarian can! (Read this essay and call me in the morning.)

You may think your message sounds loud and clear through your words, but many readers cringe through a maze of abstraction and redundancy while seeking to comprehend your voice. Writers don't want to sound "trashy" or completely lifeless in their prose (unless they are doing it on purpose: lawyers say "aye"), so heed the following remedies. Consider this essay a lesson directed towards "pruning" prudently. Just like the art of gardening, few people are naturally clear writers-both are acquired talents. If you want to write clearly (or provide a plant with vitality), you must work at it and care about the results. There are no quick fixes. But you can attain both goals by developing habits that, over time, virtually guarantee improvement. The road to healing your "wordiness" begins with employing two healthy habits: (1) focus on your action and (2) focus on your meaning.

Take abstract nouns and verbs, for example; they convey weak images and are often difficult to read and remember. Employ habit number one: focus on your action and who is doing the action. Consider the advice that my creative writing professor once gave me: "Don't just tell me, show me." Achieve this virtue by locating your main verb in each sentence and ask yourself, "what's happening?" Weak verbs, like a form of the linking verb "to be," often suppress the action. Instead, find a lively verb. The following sentence illustrates this dilemma:

Some of the students who are in opposition to the increase of the parking fee feel there is doubt about its practicality.

Why not condense the verbs into a more direct and powerful expression: "Some of the students who oppose the increase of the parking fee doubt its practicality." Notice the gained emphasis of the word "doubt" in this re-arrangement, and we even went from 23 words down to 15. Also, by pruning the verb phrases to focus more on the action, you will more likely match up the subjects and verbs correctly--a little added bonus.

The use of intensifiers and passive voice also plague the active content of a sentence. According to The Short Handbook for Writers, written by Gerald Schiffhorst and Donald Pharr, "If the subject of the sentence receives the action, its verb is in the passive voice. If the subject does the action, the verb is in the active voice." (Doctors of English to the rescue!) Consider how this rule applies in the following passive construction:

The process by which scholarships are awarded is viewed by many student applicants as extremely political.

This sentence can easily be activated by attributing the action to the subject itself: "Students view [or regard] the process...." Also notice how the word "extremely" functions as an intensifier. We tend to use these words of exaggeration for emphasis, although the force achieved is usually either clichéd or just plain abstract. These words say little more than "whoopee." Remember, if a word needs so much intensification, it may not be the most concrete option to begin with. For example, why add the intensifier "extremely" to the abstract adjective "hot" when you can use "sweltering" as the most concise option? Keep all these facts in mind while pruning your phrases down to focus on the action, and you'll be cultivating concrete sentences in no time.

Above all, clarity is paramount in writing. However, along with abstraction, wordiness in the form of redundancy can easily clutter your bright ideas. Redundancy is a form of repetition, usually overstating something you can say more precisely. Remedy this by employing healthy habit number two: focus on the underlying meaning. The frequency of redundant phrases in English would surprise you. (Did you notice the redundancy in the first sentence of this paragraph?) George Carlin in his book Brain Droppings includes a list of redundancies commonly used, perhaps without conscious realization of their rambling. The semantic results are quite humorous if you think about them:

close proximity, inner core, common bond, join together, focus in, time period, time clock, future plans, past experience, prior history, revert back, linger on, personal belongings, security guard, foreign imports, subject matter, honest truth, bare naked, general public, exactly right, free gift, first time ever, end result

Lastly, as you consciously focus upon your action and meaning, avoid opening your sentences with short expressions such as "it was" and "there are." These expressions, also called expletives, create monotony by delaying the arrival of the sentence's subject. Donald Hall provides a chart of common expletive phrases in his book Writing Well and suggests improvements. The column on the left can all be "pruned" into more focused phases.

You probably feel your symptoms wearing off already. Now we can integrate what we have discussed. Most of us construct spoken sentences just as naturally as we put one foot in front of the other because we instinctively understand how language works. However, when we enter the realm of the written word, modes of communication become more complicated. Choosing the correct sentence patterns and matching up the different parts makes us more conscious of how we form our messages. That's why the concept of "pruning" is so important: it revolves around not only removing excess words, but also shaping our messages in the most concrete and cohesive form possible. Sentences with lively action, sharp wording, and structural variety are perhaps most often pleasing to read. By focusing on our healthy habits, we will more easily spot redundancy, concentrate our meaning into succinct expressions, and choose potent words to remedy phrases of verbose-grandiosis.