A final device for escaping wordiness you will have discovered for yourself while composing telegrams and telegraphic night letters.  It is to pass over details not vital to your purpose.  Of course you must have due regard for circumstances; details needed for one purpose may be superfluous for another.  But all of us are familiar with the person who loses her ideas in a rigmarole of prosaic and irrelevant facts.  Such a person is Shakespeare’s scatter-brained Dame Quickly.  On one occasion this voluble woman is shrilly reproaching Sir John Falstaff for his indebtedness to her.  “What is the gross sum that I owe thee?” he inquires.  She might answer simply:  “If thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too.  Thou didst promise to marry me.  Deny it if thou canst.”  Instead, she plunges into a prolix recital of the circumstances of the engagement, so that the all-important fact that the engagement exists has no special emphasis in her welter of words.  “If thou wert an honest man,” she cries, “thyself and the money too.  Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife.  Canst thou deny it?  Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher’s wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some, whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound?  And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long they should call me madam?  And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings?  I put thee now to thy book-oath; deny it if thou canst.”

EXERCISE — Wordiness III

1.  Study the following paragraph, decide which ideas are important, and strike out the details that merely clog the thought: 

As I stepped into the room, I heard the clock ticking and that caused me to look at it.  It sits on the mantelpiece with some layers of paper under one corner where the mantel is warped.  When the papers slip out or we move the clock a little as we’re dusting, the ticking stops right away.  Of course the clock’s not a new one at all, but it’s an old one.  It has been in the family for many a long year, yes, from even before my father’s time.  Let me see, it was bought by my grandfather.  No, it couldn’t have been grandfather that bought it; it was his brother.  Oh, yes, I remember now; my mother told me all about it, and I’d forgotten what she said till this minute.  But really my grandfather’s brother didn’t exactly buy it.  He just traded for it.  He gave two pigs and a saddle, that’s what my mother said.