高等英语考试中攻克句子改错题,最全的语法详解

The unlimited shopping spree allowed Rachel to raid the department

store and to eat everything in the cafe.

5. Wordiness

Wordiness means using more words than you absolutely need. It’s the crime you commit when you’ve only gotten four pages written of a six-page paper andit’s 1 a.m. the night before the paper’s due. It’s all that meaningless redundantjunk you write in a desperate attempt to fill up space. Here’s an example froma paper Justin wrote senior year:

“The history of nineteenth-century France is one marked by great periods of continuity and change.”

Here’s what Justin’s got: Wordy meaninglessness with only the vague sheen ofinsight. Wordiness often comes hand in hand with the passive voice, as in Justin’s weak example (“is one marked by”). Other times wordiness shows up on its own. Here’s an example:

(A) these are sights that are depicted

(B) the depiction of these sights is

(C) these sights having been depicted

(D) his depiction of these sights

(E) depicted these sights

This sentence is both wordy and passive. The underlined part could be said in half the space, and you could remove a few words without changing the

meaning of the sentence at all. For example: Pierre observed the diners and motels of middle America, and these sights are depicted in his trendy paintings.But even in that succinct version, the passive voice remains: The underlined phrase does not make it clear that Pierre depicted the sights. The phrase sightsthat are depicted makes it sound like a disembodied hand put paint on canvas.If you encountered this question on the test, you could immediately eliminate Aif you realized there was a problem to begin with. Both B and C repeat the