Verbosity & Wordiness

Every Tuesday evening, the town hall opened its oak doors for the civic planning committee. The main topic on tonight’s agenda was supposed to be the renovation of the local park, a straightforward matter that required a simple vote on budgeting for new park benches and repairing the central fountain. However, everyone on the committee knew that Arthur was in attendance, which meant the evening would not end quickly. Arthur was notoriously loquacious, capable of holding court on virtually any topic for hours on end regardless of whether anyone was listening. As soon as the chairperson opened the floor for comments, Arthur raised his hand with enthusiasm. He began his contribution with a long-winded account of his personal memories of the park dating back to his childhood in the early 1970s. He described the precise shade of green the grass used to be, the exact type of ice cream sold by a long-defunct vendor, and the weather patterns of July 1974. His speech was filled with unnecessary verbiage that served only to delay the vote. Rather than sticking to the economic figures before the council, his rambling narrative drifted into unrelated recollections of his cousin's wedding, which happened to take place in a completely different town. Members of the audience began checking their watches, shuffling their papers, and exchanging exasperated glances. The chairperson attempted to intervene, politely asking Arthur to focus his remarks on the budget proposal. However, Arthur was so verbose in his explanation of why his memories were relevant that his justification took up another ten minutes of council time. By the time he finally sat down, forty minutes had elapsed, and the committee members were too exhausted to debate the actual contract. What should have been a fifteen-minute meeting turned into a night of endless endurance, all because one member could not resist the urge to turn a simple comment into a grand theatrical performance.

The legal profession has long maintained a complicated relationship with plain language. Nowhere is this more evident than in commercial agreements, where contracts frequently swell into dozens of dense pages filled with archaic terms and redundant clauses. Critics argue that modern corporate drafting has become aggressively circumlocutory, employing complex sentence structures and indirect phrasing where direct statements would clarify obligations far better. Instead of stating that a party must pay a fee on the first day of the month, a contract might state that the obligor shall remitter the stipulated sum pursuant to the terms herein set forth prior to the passage of twenty-four hours following the month's commencement. This penchant for circumlocution is not merely an eccentric habit; it is often used intentionally by corporate legal teams to manage risk or obscure liabilities. When questioned in courtroom settings, skilled corporate attorneys frequently adopt a voluble style of delivery, rattling off complex statutory references and technical definitions at high speed to overwhelm opposing counsel. By maintaining a rapid and unstoppable stream of speech, they deflect focus from weak points in their legal arguments. Furthermore, legal briefs presented to federal judges often suffer from being excessively prolix. Rather than presenting a sharp, focused thesis supported by key precedents, attorneys feel compelled to expatiate upon every minor point of law, filling pages with exhaustive historical context that adds little value to the immediate dispute. Judges regularly voice frustration over these drawn-out filings, pointing out that extreme length dilutes the central thesis of a case. When a brief spends thirty pages exploring edge cases before reaching its principal argument, the court's attention is tested to its limits. Legal scholars continue to advocate for reforms that prioritize clarity and conciseness, yet the tradition of heavy verbiage remains deeply entrenched in corporate legal culture.

In his seminal essays on political prose, George Orwell cautioned that modern language was increasingly falling victim to mental laziness and rhetorical inflation. When political commentators and public intellectuals lose the discipline required for clear thinking, their prose inevitably turns diffuse, scattering core concepts across a wilderness of passive verbs, vague modifiers, and disconnected subclauses. Rather than delivering a sharp, cogent thesis that can be easily analyzed and debated, such speakers produce statements that lack a structural center, leaving the audience to assemble meaning from a cloud of abstract generalities. A central feature of this stylistic decay is the uncritical acceptance of garrulous political commentators who dominate cable news networks and digital panels. These speakers, valued by producers primarily for their ability to fill airtime without pause, engage in endless streams of chatter regarding minor polling fluctuations and personal political gossip. In this environment, depth of analysis is traded for continuous sound. The commentator's primary skill is not analytical rigor, but rather the capacity to remain garrulous for twenty minutes while saying almost nothing of lasting substance. Equally damaging to intellectual discourse is the widespread presence of tautology in public messaging. Modern political speech is replete with circular assertions like 'necessary essentials' or 'future prospects,' where the second word merely repeats the definition of the first. Such redundancies are not harmless errors; they erode precision by training audiences to accept meaningless padding as substantive thought. When a political platform promises to 'plan ahead for the future,' it relies on tautological phrasing to create an illusion of forward-thinking action while committing to nothing specific. When critique becomes prolix and verbose, academia itself loses its power to challenge these public distortions. Scholars who write fifty-page essays packed with unnecessary jargon often defend their work as rigorous, but in truth, excessive length often functions as a shield against scrutiny. When an argument is buried beneath mountains of dense filler, identifying logical flaws becomes an exhausting exercise. To restore integrity to discourse, writers must actively resist the urge to expatiate endlessly and instead embrace the hard work of brevity.