Techniques against the Tendency of Students for Verbosity in Written English

Abstract

One very common, recurrent, student-made, written mistake is verbosity while higher educators insist by principle on academic writing which cannot be mastered without verbosity-related faults being avoided case by case. Written verbosity, as spotted in the Department of English of the University of Oran 2, occurs in different ways only to affect the quality of student expression by making it unnecessarily long, imprecise, and even tiresome for the reader. This stylistic mistake may be unconsciously made and repeated by students of English but can be avoided for the sake of comfortable reading and understanding without altering targeted ideas. The use of superfluous words is incompatible with language formality which rather calls for conciseness for clearness. Pedagogues in the department tend to explain to learners of the different levels several strategies on how to eliminate or at least reduce written verbosity in respect of English syntax.