Is wordiness inherently bad? It’s bad if you want to say something in the fewest possible words to avoid wasting a reader’s time, or to avoid losing their trust, or to avoid annoying them. It’s bad if it trips up or confuses the reader them. Or you might avoid wordiness for aesthetic reasons, like to heighten the mental sensation of each individual word. Wordiness is bad in these cases because it causes a defect or undermines an effect you’re trying to produce.

But is wordiness itself a sin? Or is it actually useful sometimes? What about the rhythm that the “extra” words create? More generally, what about the sounds they create in a reader’s head?

Words are more than written symbols, they are things with their own unique shape and feel. From Robert Pirosh’s extraordinarily memorable cover letter:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory…I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid.

But, crucially, words cannot exist alone, they are forever enmeshed with other words. They appear in context of one another, borrowing and lending meaning, and together creating effects they alone cannot. Parallelism is one of these cumulative effects, and one where words create an effect that their individual meaning does not contain. From Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech:

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

Who would accuse MLK of wordiness for saying let freedom ring nine times in a row?