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 them. Avoiding wordiness can also be an aesthetic choice, like when you want to heighten the mental sensation of each individual word. In general, wordiness is bad if it causes a defect or undermines an effect you’re trying to produce.

But is wordiness itself a sin? Or is it 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 the memorable cover letter: letter Robert Pirosh submitted for a copywriting job:

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.

But words don’t 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. meaning. Parallelism for example is one of these cumulative effects, and one a technique where words accumulate to create an effect together that their individual meaning does not. meanings cannot. 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? Would anyone Imagine pulling him aside before he stepped up to the podium to suggest he should’ve dropped drop the eight “extra” repetitions of **let freedom ring**? ring**.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, the mighty mountains of New York, the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado, the curvaceous slopes of California, Stone Mountain of Georgia, Lookout Mountain of Tennessee, every hill and molehill of Mississippi, and from every mountainside.

Great, we’ve cut out the “redundancy” and the poetry along with it.