[RoosterRedux]

I had some excellent writing composition courses in college. My professors drilled into me the fact that no one wants to read long rambling essays.

They used to say, "Write like Hemingway...no extra words, no rambling paragraphs, be extremely economical, try to write without using adjectives and adverbs."

They called wordiness an exercise in vanity.

I have often wondered if that's where the Free Republic use of the term "vanity" for Freeper-authored threads came from.

[daniel1212]

I had some excellent writing composition courses in college. My professors drilled into me the fact that no one wants to read long rambling essays. They used to say, "Write like Hemingway...no extra words, no rambling paragraphs, be extremely economical, try to write without using adjectives and adverbs." They called wordiness an exercise in vanity.

Well, there is wordiness and there is comprehensiveness, esp. in apologetics, in which case not only are there arguments to be countered but anticipated responses to the later as well. Although, in dealing with persistent posters of RC propaganda, this is usually that of dealing with past iterations of refuted RC polemics, and which may warrant posting from past ignored refutations in response.

And since encyclicals can be quite long (John XXIII's final encyclical, Pacem in terris, is over 15,000 words), then they have their papal prolixity.