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Chapter 5: A Meeting for Overwriters Anonymous: How to Cure Prolixity
Hello, my name is Al, and I’m an over-writer.
Some people drink too much coffee. Some eat too much chocolate. And the cup of some writers overfloweth—with words. The indelicate term for this is logorrhea, or “verbal diarrhea.” The more civil term is prolixity.
If you look it up, the definition is simple: wordy, tedious, lengthy. It’s writing that is bloated and engorged with unneeded phrases. If the clutter we’ve discussed before are weeds in a garden, prolixity is the kudzu that swallows the entire yard. It’s the tendency to take the scenic route when the expressway would be better. As Mark Twain said:
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
That quote reveals a profound truth: writing concisely is hard work. Letting the words spill out unchecked is easy. Every writer struggles with this, but recognizing the problem is the first step to recovery.
Why Are We Prolix? Diagnosing the Source
Before we can treat the symptom, we have to understand the cause. Why do we overwrite? Usually, it stems from one of a few common insecurities.
Fear of Sounding Unintelligent: Some writers, especially early in their careers, believe that complex sentences and a large word count are signs of intelligence. They write in a convoluted, academic style, fearing that simple, direct prose will be seen as juvenile. The opposite is true: clarity is a sign of confident mastery.
Lack of Faith in the Idea: Sometimes, a writer doesn’t trust that their core idea, scene, or character is interesting enough on its own. So, they dress it up with excessive description and explanation, hoping the fancy language will hide a weak foundation.
Unclear Thinking: Often, rambling prose is a symptom of rambling thought. If you don’t know exactly what you want to say, you will tend to circle the point, using far more words than necessary to get there.
The “Word Count” Mentality: From high school essays to NaNoWriMo, we are often trained to hit a target page or word count, which encourages padding and teaches the bad habit of measuring progress by volume rather than by value.
Recognizing your own tendencies is key. Do you pad your sentences when you feel insecure? Do you ramble when you haven’t fully outlined your thoughts? Identifying the “why” makes it much easier to fix the “what.”
The Line Between Description and Drowning
Prolixity is not the same as rich, evocative description. Good description uses precise details to create clarity, mood, and sensory experience. Prolixity smothers the reader with words, obscuring the very thing it’s trying to describe.
Let’s look at the classic example of a sunset.
The Prolix Version: ”The orb of the sun, glowing with hues of orange and gold like a blazing beacon of warmth, began its slow, deliberate descent toward the western horizon, painting the sky in an intricate mosaic of dazzling colors that seemed almost too vibrant to be real, as though nature itself had taken up a brush and canvas to create an awe-inspiring masterpiece that defied description.”
This sentence is breathless, full of clichés (“blazing beacon,” “dazzling colors”), and tells the reader how to feel (“awe-inspiring”). It leaves no room for the imagination.
The Lean Version: ”The sun sank in a blaze of orange and gold, painting the horizon.”
This version is confident. It gives the reader powerful images and trusts them to fill in the rest. It doesn't drown them; it invites them in.
The Prolixity Pruning Method: A 3-Step Fix
Once you’ve finished your first draft (and only then!), it’s time to grab your pruning shears. Here’s a simple method to cut back the kudzu.
Step 1: Spot the Signs. Read your work and ask these critical questions:
Can I say this in fewer words? The answer is almost always yes.
Am I explaining something that’s already obvious? Trust your reader’s intelligence.
Is this sentence pulling its weight? If a sentence doesn't move the story forward, reveal character, or establish mood, it’s a candidate for deletion.
Step 2: Use the Right Tools
Read it Aloud: If you find yourself running out of breath before you reach the period, your sentence is too long.
Embrace the Period: Break long, meandering sentences into two or three shorter, more powerful ones.
Hunt for Weak Verbs: Prolixity often hides in weak verb constructions. Replace them with strong, direct verbs.
Prolix: ”She walked in a hurried manner across the room.”
Tight: ”She rushed across the room.”
Prolix: ”He made a decision to go to the store.”
Tight: ”He decided to go to the store.”
Step 3: Take the Trimming Challenge Let's practice on this passage:
“The storm, which had been brewing for several hours, finally arrived, and the sound of thunder reverberated through the air, accompanied by flashes of lightning that illuminated the darkened sky in sharp, jagged bursts of brilliant light.”
How would you trim it? There are many ways. Here’s one:
“After brewing for hours, the storm finally broke with thunder and jagged flashes of lightning.”
The Dickens Exception: When to Ramble with Purpose
Like all forms of clutter, prolixity can occasionally be used as an intentional tool. Charles Dickens is famous for his long, winding sentences, but they served the Victorian appetite for dense prose and helped establish the sprawling, immersive worlds of his novels.
For a modern writer, intentional prolixity is best used to reveal character. A rambling, bureaucratic character might speak in jargon-filled, overlong sentences. A nervous, insecure character might have rambling inner monologues. As long as the verbosity serves a clear purpose, it can be a powerful device. If it serves no purpose, it’s just bad writing.
This brings us to a fundamental truth about the craft.
Al's Axiom #5: Writing long is a failure of effort, not a sign of it.
It is easy to be wordy. It is difficult to be concise. The extra effort you spend trimming your prose is a mark of professionalism and, most importantly, a sign of respect for your reader's time. Don't hand them an overstuffed suitcase. Travel light. They will thank you for the journey.
Chapter 4: More Isn't More: A Writer's Guide to Defeating Word Bloat (Pleonasm)
In the last chapter, we hunted the “Giant Behemoth”—the loud, obvious redundancy of tautology. But clutter has a quieter, more insidious sibling. It doesn’t roar; it whispers. It doesn’t repeat; it pads. It’s the death of a thousand tiny cuts to your prose.
This sibling is called Pleonasm.
Like its brother, Tautology, the fancy name is less important than the concept. A pleonasm is simply the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning. It is a fault of style that weakens your writing by making it flabby. Where a tautology is clutter by repetition, a pleonasm is clutter by bloat.
The great writing teacher Theodore Cheney drew the distinction perfectly. He defined tautology as “the error of saying essentially the same thing again in the same sentence,” and pleonasm as “the error of having in a sentence extra words that may be deleted without changing either the meaning or the structure of the sentence.”
Think of it this way:
· Tautology: Saying A + A (e.g., “dead corpse”).
· Pleonasm: Saying A + B, where B is an extra, unneeded word (e.g., “she blinked her eyes”).
These extra words are the tiny thieves that steal momentum from your sentences. Let’s learn to catch them.
The Two Faces of Pleonasm
Pleonasms tend to show up in two main forms: the Unnecessary Specifier and the Clichéd Phrase.
Type 1: The Unnecessary Specifier
This is the most common type, where a word specifies something that is already clearly implied by another word in the sentence. Your brain automatically fills in the blank, but the writer puts the word in anyway.
Consider these examples:
· I heard the gunshot with my own ears. (What else would you hear it with?)
· She crouched down. (Is it possible to crouch up?)
· He blinked his eyes. (What else could he blink?)
· We had tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. (All tuna are fish.)
· He nodded his head in agreement. (The head is the only part you nod.)
· She shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly. (The shoulders are what we shrug.)
· He stood up from the table. (“Stood” already implies the upward motion.)
· They knelt down on the floor. (“Kneeling” is inherently a downward motion.)
In every case, removing the bolded words loses nothing and gains sharpness. “I heard the gunshot.” “She crouched.” “He nodded.” The sentences are instantly stronger, cleaner, and more professional.
Type 2: The Clichéd Phrase (or “Padded Phrases”)
This is where writers, often trying to sound more formal or authoritative, use a three- or four-word phrase where a single word would do. These padded, clichéd phrases are rampant in corporate, academic, and political speech, and they bleed into our writing.
Here is a list of common offenders and their lean, clean alternatives:
· At this point in time → Now
· Due to the fact that → Because / Since
· For all intents and purposes → Effectively / Essentially
· In the event that → If
· In order to → To
· It is often the case that → Often
· On the occasion of → When
· A large number of → Many
· The vast majority of → Most
· In the close vicinity of → Near
· Basic fundamentals → Fundamentals (or Basics)
· End result → Result
· Final outcome → Outcome
Trimming down these phrases is one of the fastest ways to improve the pace and clarity of your writing. Instead of “Due to the fact that the budget was cut, we could not, in order to save money, hire new staff,” you get: “Because the budget was cut, we could not hire new staff to save money.” The meaning is identical, but the sentence is vastly improved.
Your Secret Weapon: The Red-Pen Test
How do you find these tiny thieves in your own work? You can use a simple tool I call “The Red-Pen Test.”
It’s easy: Read your sentence, mentally cross out the suspicious word or phrase, and read it again. If the meaning remains unchanged, that word was clutter. Delete it.
Let's apply it:
· Sentence: He was both tall and heavy.
· Red-Pen Test: ”He was tall and heavy.”
· Verdict: The meaning is identical. The word “both” is almost always superfluous when you are connecting two things with “and.” Delete it.
· Sentence: It is absolutely essential that we finish today.
· Red-Pen Test: ”It is essential that we finish today.”
· Verdict: ”Essential” is an absolute word; it cannot be graded. It’s like being “very unique” or “slightly pregnant.” The modifier adds nothing but noise. Delete it.
The Exception: Intentional Clutter for Character Voice
As with all writing rules, there are times to break them. In The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler wrote: “Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs.”
Is “poodle dogs” a pleonasm? Yes, all poodles are dogs. But Chandler wrote from the first-person perspective of his hero, Philip Marlowe. Marlowe is a cynical, world-weary detective, and “poodle dogs” is exactly how a guy like that might talk. Chandler intentionally chose to keep the clutter to stay true to his character's voice.
So, if your character is a politician who speaks in clichés or a stuffy academic, you might intentionally use pleonasms in their dialogue or narration to reveal character. The key, once again, is that it must be a deliberate choice.
Conclusion: The Power of Subtraction
Fighting pleonasms is about developing a feel for the weight of each word. It's about recognizing that more is not more. More is often less. Less clarity, less impact, less professionalism. By trimming these extra, unneeded words, your writing becomes sharper, your pacing improves, and your message shines through. This brings us to a core principle of great writing.
Al's Axiom #4: Good writers know what to add. Great writers know what to leave out.
Hunting the Giant Behemoth: A Writer’s Guide to Eliminating Redundancy
The other night, I stumbled upon a 1958 British monster movie on Turner Classic Movies. The title was The Giant Behemoth. I grew up on these films, but something about this title tripped me up. Then I realized why: it was an accidental lesson in writing.
The Giant Behemoth is a cluttered title. Specifically, it’s a tautology—a fancy term for saying the same thing twice using different words. It’s a redundancy. By definition, a behemoth is a giant. There’s no such thing as a “tiny behemoth.” The word “giant” is pure clutter.
This kind of redundancy is one of the most common weeds in our literary gardens. As William Zinsser said, “Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind.” Tautologies sneak into our work when we aren’t looking, weakening our prose and adding unnecessary weight.
But here’s the good news: once you learn to spot them, they are easy to fix. This guide will give you the tools to hunt down the “giant behemoths” in your own writing.
When Redundancy Works (and When It Doesn’t)
Not all repetition is bad. A skilled writer can use it intentionally to create rhythm or drive home a point. Edgar Allan Poe did it for poetic effect:
“But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door…”
Abraham Lincoln, a master wordsmith, used it for rhetorical power in his Second Inaugural Address:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all…”
He could have just said, “With charity for all,” but by balancing the negative (“no malice”) with the positive (“charity”), he amplified his message of reconciliation. In these cases, the key word is intentional.
The problem is, 99% of tautologies are unintentional. They are the crudest form of redundancy, and they make our writing clunky and unprofessional.
Your Tautology Field Guide: 22 Common Culprits
The first step is learning to recognize these redundant phrases. They are so common in everyday speech that we often write them without a second thought. Here are some of the most frequent offenders.
Own autobiography → autobiography
Free gift → gift
Advance forward → advance
Retreat to the rear → retreat
True facts → facts
Planned conspiracy → conspiracy
Few in number → few
Usual custom → custom
Fatal murder → murder (Attempted murder is not fatal)
Dead corpse → corpse
Small dwarf → dwarf
Hot fire → fire
New innovation → innovation
Evening sunset → sunset
Exactly the same → the same (or exact)
Brief glance → glance
A moment in time → a moment
Popular with the people → popular
1:00 p.m. in the afternoon → 1:00 p.m. (or 1 in the afternoon)
Advance warning → warning
Deliberately targeted → targeted
In my opinion, I think… → In my opinion… (or I think…)
This list could go on and on. Our speech patterns are full of these, and they naturally flow into our writing. That’s why we edit.
Your Secret Weapon: The "As-Opposed-To" Test
Now for the fun part. How do you check if a phrase is redundant? You can apply a simple, powerful diagnostic tool I call the "As-Opposed-To" Test.
When you see a suspicious phrase, just ask yourself, "...as opposed to what?" The answer will usually reveal the clutter. Let's try it on a few examples.
Phrase: I am writing my own autobiography.
The Test: ...as opposed to writing someone else's autobiography?
The Logic: An autobiography is, by definition, a history of one's life written by oneself. The "auto" means "self." You can't write anyone else's.
The Fix: "I am writing my autobiography."
Phrase: He took a brief glance at the report.
The Test: ...as opposed to a long, lingering glance?
The Logic: A glance is, by definition, a brief or hurried look. A long look is a "stare" or a "gaze," not a glance.
The Fix: "He glanced at the report."
Phrase: These are the true facts of the case.
The Test: ...as opposed to the false facts?
The Logic: A fact is a thing that is known or proved to be true. If it isn't true, it isn't a fact. (While we now hear terms like "alternate facts," in clear writing, a fact is a fact.)
The Fix: "These are the facts of the case."
Phrase: The general ordered them to retreat to the rear.
The Test: ...as opposed to retreating to the front?
The Logic: To retreat means to move back or withdraw. The direction is already built into the word.
The Fix: "The general ordered them to retreat."
Once you start applying this test, you'll see these redundancies everywhere. Is a fire ever not hot? Is a corpse ever not dead? Is an innovation ever old? The test makes spotting and fixing these errors simple and, honestly, a little bit fun. With a little practice, your writing will become tighter, cleaner, and far more professional.
The Hidden Reef: Why Clutter Is Silently Sinking Your Writing
My wife and I love the ocean. When we were younger, we’d snorkel every week, exploring the vibrant world just beneath the waves. Now, we often just sit and watch the undulating blue surface of the Pacific. It’s beautiful, but I never forget that the real action—the life and the danger—is happening just a few feet down.
Sailors know the sea’s surface can be deceptive. Near the shore, hidden reefs wait to tear a hole in the hull of any unsuspecting vessel.
Your writing has its own hidden reefs. And the most dangerous one of all is clutter. It’s a quiet threat, one that can run your manuscript aground before it ever has a chance to set sail. Tolerating clutter isn’t just a stylistic choice; it's an act of self-sabotage that can sink your writing career. Here’s why it matters so much.
Reason 1: It Gets You Rejected by the Gatekeepers
Let’s start with the most pragmatic reason: agents and editors despise clutter. Imagine an acquisitions editor’s desk—or, more accurately today, their inbox. It’s a torrential flood of submissions. To survive, they must make decisions quickly. They are actively hunting for two things: something that grips them from the first sentence, and any problem that gives them a valid reason to say "no."
Clutter is the easiest “no” you can give them.
Producing a book is a costly and difficult venture. If a manuscript requires heavy editing and rewriting, those costs skyrocket. An editor will almost always pass on a needy project in the hopes that the next one in the pile will be cleaner, more professional, and require less heavy lifting. A cluttered manuscript signals to them that the author hasn't done the work.
Reason 2: It Alienates Your Most Important Audience—Readers
That first reason alone should be enough to make any writer sit up and pay attention. But there’s another, more fundamental one: cluttered writing is exhausting for readers.
During my graduate studies in theology, I was assigned a text by a well-respected, early-20th-century theologian. His knowledge was legendary, but it was buried in thick, intractable prose. Single paragraphs ran for five pages. Every sentence was a battle. My fellow students and I weren't gathering his gems of insight; we were forced to mine them from hard ground with a pickaxe. It was joyless work.
The result? All his wisdom and knowledge went unlearned and unappreciated.
Some writers operate under the misguided idea that "If I write it, they will read it." They won't. It is far easier for a reader to set a book down than it is to pick it up. Once set aside, a difficult book is rarely returned to. It becomes shelf decoration or a garage sale item marked "$1.00."
This leads to a business nightmare: negative word-of-mouth. Everyone in publishing agrees that positive word-of-mouth is the holy grail of advertising. But the reverse is also true. A book that leaves a lump in the reader's stomach gets talked about, too. "I couldn't get through it." "I had no idea what the author was getting at."
Worse yet, some readers will return the book for a refund. Those returns go straight back to the publisher, putting a real ding in your royalties and souring the publisher on the idea of giving you a contract for your next book.
The Crucial Question: When Should You Worry About It
I know this all sounds like doom and gloom. But here is the single most important piece of good news I can give you about clutter. Please, give me your full attention, because this is where so many writers go astray and fall into a trap.
The trap is the paralysis of analysis. We get so bound up in the details that we lose sight of the big picture and freeze. So, when should you worry about cutting the clutter?
Al’s Axiom #3: Don’t worry about clutter when writing your first draft. Obsess about it when you rewrite.
The first draft is not for public consumption. It is your private laboratory. It’s a place to experiment, to make a mess, to pour the story onto the page. The goal of a first draft is simply to get it done. Focus on character, plot, and theme. Forget about clutter. As Ernest Hemingway famously quipped, "Write drunk, edit sober." The point is to separate the creative act from the analytical one.
Many promising writers quit because they judge their first draft too harshly. Of course it's bad! Expecting a first draft to be polished is like expecting the raw ingredients you just mixed to taste like a fully cooked meatloaf.
Finish your first draft first. Celebrate it. Then, and only then, put on your editor’s hat and go to work. Rewriting is where you turn raw material into art. It's when you cut the clutter. It's not drudgery; it's like a musician finally getting to play a finely-tuned instrument.
By learning to see and eliminate clutter in the rewriting phase, you not only improve your work and build your reputation, but you also heighten your appreciation for the masters. You start to see the clean, concise, distraction-free prose that makes a story truly memorable. That’s how the magic happens.
Clear the Clutter #1: The Secret to Professional, Powerful Prose
Some years ago, a publisher introduced me to a new writer, a pastor from the south with a collection of insightful devotional thoughts. He had talent, intelligence, and a poet’s heart. His content was a gem. But there was a problem.
The writing, while full of wisdom, wasn't ready to go to press. It was my job to sort it, structure it, and—most importantly—improve the prose.
As I began editing his chapters, something wonderful happened. He wasn't just a client; he became a student. His questions grew keener, his insights sharper. By the time we finished the project, he had so thoroughly absorbed the practice of self-editing that he could fly on his own. The secret to his transformation wasn't learning complex new rules. It was learning what to take away.
He learned to clear the clutter.
Over more than two decades of writing, teaching at conferences, and editing for publishers and private clients, I’ve seen one problem snare writers of all levels, from nervous novices to seasoned pros. It’s the single most common disease in writing.
Clutter.
The Enemy in Our Prose
Clutter is the collection of unnecessary words, circular constructions, and pompous frills that dilute our meaning and bore our readers. As the great William Zinsser wrote in On Writing Well, “Clutter is the disease of American Writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words.”
Why do we do it? New writers often believe that more words mean better writing, that a higher word count somehow equates to stronger prose and more satisfied readers. We have a misconception that clutter-free writing will be seen as juvenile or simplistic, and our genius will be overlooked.
The opposite is true. The best writers go the extra mile to trim every unneeded word and phrase. Vigorous, professional writing isn't bloated; it's lean. It’s evidence of a writer who respects their message and, more importantly, their reader’s time. This leads to my first principle:
Al’s Axiom #1:
Writing is putting words on the page. Great writing is taking words off the page.
The Philosophy of “Less is More”
The masters of the craft have understood this for centuries. Mark Twain is famously credited with saying, “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
The principle extends beyond just writing. It’s a philosophy of focused creation. As Albert Einstein advised, “Out of clutter, find simplicity.”
Perhaps no one articulated this for writers better than E.B. White in his classic, The Elements of Style:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
Read that again. That every word tell. This is our goal. A passage like White’s is tight yet riveting. It needs no additions, and it suffers horribly if anything is taken away. He doesn’t just make the point; he proves it by example.
Cleaning Up the Construction Site
Reading a cluttered manuscript is like walking through an active construction site. You can see that something good is being built, but the ground is littered with leftover wood, stray bricks, and chunks of concrete. That’s what literary clutter is: the detritus of the creation process. It’s necessary while erecting the story, but it becomes debris once the structure is finished.
The last act of any good contractor is to clean the site, removing every piece of trash so the beauty of the building can shine through. The last act of the writer is to do the same.
Think of it another way. Imagine a mason who calculates he needs 1,000 bricks to build a perfect wall but insists on using 1,200. Where would the extra 200 bricks go? They would distort the wall, creating a faulty, amateurish structure. The professional uses only what is necessary to do the job.
It is the same for us. We are miners digging for diamonds. A diamond in the raw is unimpressive, but in the hands of a master jeweler, it becomes a coveted treasure. The jeweler doesn’t add to the stone; they skillfully chip away the imperfections to add facets that refract the light. Finding the diamond in your first draft is only the beginning. Making it shine requires taking things away.
Clutter-Free Writing is Literary Self-Defense
If the artistic argument isn't enough, consider the practical one. Getting an agent or a publisher is brutally competitive. Agents and acquisitions editors are buried under a mountain of submissions. Years ago, I stood in one of my editor's cubicles, surrounded by nearly twenty teetering piles of manuscripts. Today, the piles are digital, but the volume is even greater.
These gatekeepers are looking for a reason to say no. They must make decisions in minutes, not hours. If your manuscript is poorly edited and choked with clutter, you’ve given them the easiest reason to reject it and move on.
But if the writing is engaging, clean, and distraction-free… they pause. They read on. They love a writer who has done the hard work of editing. They love a manuscript free of clutter because it shows professionalism and respect for the craft. In this light, cleaning your manuscript is an essential act of career preservation.
Al’s Axiom #2:
Cleaning your manuscript of clutter is literary self-defense.
This isn't drudgery. If you love words and story, then taking a page from good to great is the most exhilarating fun you can have. This is where the real magic happens—not in the frenzied first draft, but in the focused, fine-tuning of the edit.
It’s time to leap in.
Your First Step: Open your current work-in-progress. Go to a single page and read it aloud. Your goal is simple: cut 10% of the words on that page without losing any of the meaning. You’ll be amazed at how much stronger, clearer, and more professional it becomes.
(Drawn from Alton Gansky’s CLEARING THE CLUTTER, Chapter 1)
