“I tackled my first English essay in college with enthusiasm, a thesaurus, and a naive disregard for page limits,” writes Carolyn Arends in an April 2014 article in Christianity Today. To her dismay the professor returned her paper with this comment: “Carolyn, you’ve made some fine points, but unfortunately they are lost in a sea of circumlocutious wordiness.”
While Carolyn admits she has always “loved words” and “a well turned phrase,” she confesses that she grew “troubled by a growing sense that (she) needed to pay more attention to wordless things.” She asks, ” Have I reduced the scope of what I can know to what I can articulate?” Continue reading