But is longer better if your overworked instructor falls asleep before getting to that dynamite conclusion you worried so much about. Probably not. In fact, good writing is almost always more concise than bad writing and almost always has a higher verb-to-noun ratio. In many real-world writing situations (where no one has to read what you've written) space actually equals money, or something else important like the boss' attention, and a lack of conciseness can be expensive. You'll experience the need for conciseness when you complete your first graduate school application and have to write your life story in a single page. So start practicing conciseness now.
Look through your sentences for verbs that are buried in nouns and see if you can unearth them. Revising the sample sentences below will help you learn the technique. Find the "buried" verb and rewrite the sentence in fewer words.
1. Freud offers the argument that dreams have a hidden logic that is
contained within them. Revision
2. When we employ the use of the argument from design, we make the
inference that design provides a sign
of something invisible being present.
Revision
Circumlocution: The Latin roots of this word mean "talking around," and it too adds needless padding to your sentences. Writing from A to Z (p. 229) has a good list of wordy phrases and their simpler equivalents. For example, "due to the fact that" is easily reduced to "because."
Redundancy: Writing from A to Z (p. 228) also shows how we often carelessly add words without adding meaning. Adding "past" to "history," for instance, adds nothing but an empty word, and yet we often find ourselves talking about past history or end results or final products. Looking over the list in A to Z can make you more aware of language.