“Unlocking Your Writing Potential: Are You Making These 8 Surprising Mistakes?”
3. Verbiage
Despite popular belief, verbiage is not a synonym for words or text. It specifically means an “overabundance or superfluity of words, as in writing or speech; wordiness” (source). Verbiage is not a good thing. It means you’re using too many words and the work could be more concise. Verbiage occurs for a number of reasons. Poets often resort to verbiage to meet meter requirements. Students use it to meet page-count requirements for their essays. Verbiage also happens when writers try to use a lot of fancy words and language to make themselves sound smart. And almost all writers create verbiage in early drafts, especially if discovery writing is involved. Don’t spend an entire paragraph saying something that could be said in a single sentence. You’ll put your readers to sleep!
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