verbosity

A cousin of mine remarked that my recipe for cabbage was "...verbose!!!" (and she received the edited version!). Since I take all things to heart [yet can be equally dismissive] I will state my wordy case for verbosity, but only in regard of the printed word. A concise and succinct use of the language should be the golden rule of writing. "Don't alienate the reader"(Strunk & White). That challenge is rarely met anywhere. But there's no ceiling for the number of things one may describe concisely toward one's effort to be succinct. It was, for example, not only a matter of style for Oscar Wilde to preface nearly every entrance of a character into a room with two or three pages devoted to how the room was furnished. His frequent use of italicised foreign terms and phrases come closer to alienating the reader than the overall number of his words. If the room did not contain the twelve or so objects and patterns worthy of exhaustive description how could he have made you believe in the next page or so that this character was either worldly or perceptive. "He flung himself into a [adjective, adjective, proper noun ] chair and languished [something-ly]..." To do this in a room and in a chair unworthy of notation describes a dull man preparing himself (and the reader) to get duller. But okay, that's fiction, not a recipe. The basic recipe from 'Joy Of Cooking' (Rombauer/Rombauer Becker) economically describes six steps to incorporate six ingredients. My recipe entails (say) ten steps to incorporate eight ingredients. Any fool can cook cabbage- the recipe is mine because of the expansion, includes options to suit individual tastes, and outlines it's conversion into a main dish with really only one additional step. My choice of the narrative form condenses oompteen pages in 'Joy Of Cooking' that address cabbage, browning, parboiling, sauteing, and seasoning. So my re-tooling of all this information is actually an abridgement. Admittedly, I get into parenthetical trouble sometimes, but considering the venue is a blog and with that an implication that the editor should not be completely trusted, I would be willing to defend a description of say, the contents of a woman's purse up to five hundred words, probably not far past that. Too verbose? Feel free to skim. If I were my cousin [my Dad would be his own brother](see?), I would have gone after my tendency toward unevenly punctuated run-on sentences. Past such time as I am able to confirm that my penchant for clarity (sometimes at the expense of brevity) is the reason I am so widely unread, I'll be knotting these daisy-chains of unbridled verbage 'round things probably few more people than just I find interesting anyway. In the three-dimentional world, I just sort of wander around mumbling to myself. This is likely my best shot at making myself understood.