Yack, yack, yack...or yak, yak, yak...choose your variant

Buck brings up a subject I've been stewing about for some time. Wordiness is endemic. There are several blogs I almost never read because they take 1500 words to say things they could say in 150 if they were disciplined.

Hell, most of the time I use at least 20% more words than needed to say what I want to, but then I'm terminally lazy.

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas. An average American book is twice as long as a British book on the same subject. The same is true of articles.

There is not an idea that cannot be expressed in 200 words. But the writer must know exactly what he wants to say. If you have nothing to say and boldly want to say it, then all the words in the dictionary will not suffice.

Do not count a, of, the, and, etc. Averaging the number of words in a line is OK.

I apologize for stealing so much from Buck's post. My bad at the very least. Hey, at least I linked to it.

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