Know, gentle reader, and I speak here as an experienced and accomplished chronicler in my own right (as the gentle reader has already had occasion to judge, from his perusal of these preceding pages of our tale), that of all the sins and foibles which afflict the writer?be that writer a scribe or a scribbler, a diarist or a dramatist, a narrator or a notary?there is none so foul, so odious, so disreputable, so arrant, so untoward, so deplorable, so infamous and so peccant as verbosity, yes, I say again, verbosity, that malignant cancer of the narrator's craft, which, under its many names?whether those be the names preferred by the educated gentility: wordiness, long-windedness, prolixity, superfluity or garrulity; or yet those more exact and fine-focused terms which are the natural optation of the scholar, the rigor of whose training in the necessity of precise meaning naturally leads them to such labels as: longiloquence, largiloquence, grandiloquence, multiloquence, polylogy and rodomontade, not to mention the yet-more-technical terms of the specialist: nimiety, pleonasm and amphigory (or amphigouri, as the purists insist); or those euphemisms which are, not surprisingly, the terms of choice of the verbose themselves, I speak here of: circumlocution, loquacity and eloquence; or even, for we should not in natural pride of our intellect and refinement ignore their cultural contributions, meager and crude though these be, the coarse epithets which are oft heard from the lips of the uneducated and unwashed: chatter, jabber, prattle, gabble, babble, blabber and blather?wreaks the greatest havoc of all the literary vices upon the heart of literature and narrative itself, that heart being, although most (even exceptionally well-read) literates are unconscious?say rather, not fully conscious?even of its existence, much less its centrality, the fundamental bond of trust which develops 'twixt writer and reader as these twain intersect, though indirectly and at a distance (a distance measured not simply in space but in time), without which education itself becomes an impossibility, for the reader becomes wearied and overtaxed, and thus loses his concentration, indeed, even his interest, while?what is worse!?the writer loses all sense of the purpose of his craft, the which is not to aggrandize himself, in a frivolous display of empty virtuosity, but to impart to the reader the pith and the meat of the tale which he tells, and in so doing, loses all grasp on reality and reason, falling thus further and further into the fell sway of those psychologic disorders which we know as solipsism and egomania.
--Eric Flint
