This idea was submitted by Chelsey Philpot, who teaches nonfiction writing at Boston University. She is the author of two young adult novels (“Be Good Be Real Be Crazy” and “Even in Paradise”) and her work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate and BuzzFeed.
Teachers might use this lesson to prepare students for The Learning Network’s second annual 100-Word Personal Narrative Contest, which is accepting submissions until Nov. 1.
Do you teach with The Times? Tell us about it here, or browse our full collection of reader ideas.
Lesson Overview
Rule 17: Omit needless words. — “The Elements of Style,” William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
Of all the commandments contained in “The Elements of Style,” the ubiquitous writing guide by Cornell professor William Strunk Jr. and his former student, and author, E.B. White, Rule 17, “Omit needless words,” has proved to be the most pertinent in my writing classrooms.
When I was new to teaching writing to young adults and teenagers, I theorized that social media, texting and even our shortened attention spans meant that I should be ready for terse correspondences, malnourished prose and final assignments that just barely made the required word count.
I was way off.
Indeed, my experience teaching nonfiction writing to undergraduates and high school students has taught me that today’s nascent writers hand in assignments just as full of redundancies, unnecessary prepositions and fluff as those Cornell students presented to Strunk over a century ago.
In this lesson, students will learn the importance of concise, clear writing as well as techniques for spotting and omitting those pesky “needless” words.
Warm-Up
Educators will need a whiteboard or whiteboard app such as Web Whiteboard or Whiteboard.fi to share definitions, examples and student responses.
1. Define “wordiness” and share examples.
Wordy sentences are sentences that contain more words than they require to clearly communicate a point or idea.
When teachers write “wordy,” “bloated” or “verbose” in the margins of a paper, they aren’t saying that a sentence is too long, nor that its structure is too complicated. Rather, they are stating that “needless” words are hindering the clear communication of the students’ ideas.
2. Introduce Rule 17.
If you haven’t used “The Elements of Style” in your classroom, give students a synopsis of the book’s history (“‘The Elements of Style’ Turns 50” by Sam Roberts is a great resource for this) before sharing and explaining the dictum to “Omit needless words.”
3. Brainstorm in small groups.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. — “The Elements of Style,” William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White
Divide your class into small groups of three to five students. Ask each group to carefully read the above quotation before answering the questions below.
What does it mean to “omit needless words”?
What does it mean “that every word tell”?
Why is wordy writing problematic?
What are tactics you can use to spot wordy writing?
Can wordiness ever be a good thing?
Invite a member from each small group to record students’ responses on the classroom whiteboard or online whiteboard app. Bring the class together to discuss what the groups have shared.
If students did not come up with the following thoughts on their own, educators will want to add them to the whiteboard during discussion.
Wordiness is problematic because …
it can hinder the clear communication of ideas.
it can lead to readers losing interest.
it can make the text sound as though the writer is adding more words merely to meet a page or word-count quota.
Exercise: Create, Find and Fix Wordy Writing
This exercise helps students identify wordiness in their own writing by asking them (in small groups) to make a Times article wordy, then challenge their peers to edit the piece back to clarity and concision.
1. Choose and discuss.
Have each group select a recent New York Times article to make verbose.
If students have a Times subscription, they can choose their own articles. Encourage them to focus on headlines that seem to promise light subject matter (the Style section is a great place to start). Overall, your goal during this step is to avoid trivializing breaking news stories.
Here are some examples of articles that would work well:
On the Coney Island Boardwalk, It’s the Summer of Snakes (and a Wallaby)
Are You Ready? The Nu Metal Renaissance Is Upon Us.
A Long, Shining River of Verse, Flowing From a Rower and Writer
She Steals Surfboards by the Seashore. She’s a Sea Otter.
The Mango Is King of the Miami Summer
This Ancient Whale May Have Been the Heaviest Animal Ever
Furby, Is That You?
The Dance of Too-Hot Summer? Melt Into the Pinegrove Shuffle.
And if you’re looking for short, but engaging, articles students can get through quickly, have them choose a Tiny Love Story from the Modern Love column or this handy teaching resource. Are your students taking part in this year’s 100-Word Personal Narrative Contest? Ask them to select a work from among the 2022 contest winners.
Once groups have chosen a piece, each member should read it carefully before discussing the following questions:
What’s the article about?
How would you describe the article’s style?
Are there any places where the author uses more words than necessary?
2. Introduce common wordiness errors.
Once students have discussed their piece, take some time to go over common wordiness culprits. Come armed with plenty of examples, including some from students’ own work (be sure to redact anything that might identify the writer, or ask students beforehand for permission to use their work).
Here is a starter list of common wordy phrases that educators can share with their students and expand upon.
Redundancies
Repetitive expressions decorate our conversations so seamlessly that it’s no wonder phrases like “8 a.m. in the morning,” “join together,” “close proximity” and “A.T.M. machine” find their ways into student papers.
Needless or unintentional repetition
When repetition is used deliberately it can be a powerful communication tool, adding cadence to speeches, emphasis to ideas and poetic pauses that force readers to slow their pace. However, when students repeat ideas, words or phrases unthinkingly, repetition becomes a wordiness issue, leading to tangled sentences and confused or annoyed readers.
Sometimes bad repetition is obvious:
I have been playing soccer most of my life and it has played a significant role throughout my life.
The feeling I felt after the competition will stay with me forever.
Other times, identifying it requires students to slow down and think about the words they’ve chosen and their meaning:
I volunteered to coach illiterate adults who did not know how to read.
Lazy verbs
Strive to use active instead of passive verbs: I wrote the paper is easier to read than The paper was written by me.
Whenever possible, avoid using “to be” as your main verb: My sister is quick to reply to my texts, versus My sister replies to my texts promptly.
Watch out for nominalization (converting parts of speech such as verbs and adjectives into nouns) as it leads to clunky writing. For example, Margot made a distortion of the story, which made her plot difficult to follow, is three words longer than Margot distorted the story, which made her plot difficult to follow.
Preposition overload
Look for places where excessive prepositional phrases have caused bloat:
Students will understand the reason for the assignments being due exactly on the first of April once the latest version of the rubric for the assignment has been dispersed among all students.
Often, prepositions can be eliminated without changing a sentence’s meaning.
Add-nothing adjectives and adverbs
Adjectives and adverbs add nothing to a sentence when they’re redundant, nonsensical or simply not needed.
For example, the first of the following two sentences contains an unnecessary modifier, which the second version eliminates: Flynn yelled loudly for help after he saw the two cars collide, versus Flynn yelled for help after he saw the two cars collide.
No matter what the rules are, what matters is getting rid of words and phrases that are only taking up space. If they add nothing, they’ve got to go.
3. Inflate.
Now the fun begins.
Have students take the articles they’ve chosen and make them more wordy by replacing terms or phrases, adding modifiers, pumping up the prepositions, and doing whatever else they can do to increase sentences’ word counts without changing their meanings.
For example, from the article “On the Coney Island Boardwalk, It’s the Summer of Snakes (and a Wallaby),” I took this delightful sentence:
The variety of wildlife available for photographs at Coney Island made headlines this month when a young man’s pet wallaby, that kangaroo-adjacent animal native to Australia, was seized on the boardwalk by the police. (34 words)
And made it into a barely readable behemoth:
The variety of different wildlife animals made available for photographs at Coney Island made attention-grabbing and interesting headlines this present month when a young man in his early 20s had his pet wallaby, that kangaroo-adjacent animal that comes from the country of Australia, seized and taken by police who were assigned to patrol Coney Island and who were on the boardwalk at the time the wallaby was spotted. (68 words)
4. Exchange and revise.
Have students put away their selected articles before asking groups to exchange the bloated sentences they’ve created with one another. Challenge student groups to revise their classmates’ wordy sentences until they’re clear and concise.
5. Compare versions and reflect.
Ask students to compare their revised sentences to their counterparts in the published articles.
Did students’ reworked versions come close to the original writing?
Did students’ versions fail to catch any needless words or phrases?
Do any of their sentences improve upon the original work?
I’ll leave you with a final thought: Can wordiness sometimes work? Sure, but as I tell my students many times a semester: You must know the rules before you can knowingly break them.
