We recently published a podcast and article on our website about tight writing and an astute listener asked a follow-up question.

Hello, Mignon. I have a follow-up question regarding your last big episode. Actually, you're on writing in a more compact way,

and I was wondering whether there are any cases in particular where you do want to lengthen your sentence,

where you want some of what's there in the middle to prove your point or where you do want some repetition to,

like, for rhythm or for convention, are there any cases like this or should we always,

like, I get it's a general rule that we do want to write more compactly, but are there any cases where we actually want to make a sentence?

Yeah, that's my question and thank you for your podcast and the content.

This is a great question. As with grammar, writing doesn't always follow a single set of rules.

There are definitely times when you may need to include more detail or even use longer sentences.

grammar girl here, I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

Stick around, because after we talk about expansive writing, we're going to talk about the difference between the words behead and decapitate

as a sneaky way to explore the B and D prefixes.

One time you may want to use loser writing is in fiction, where context, scene setting and character development all help your readers enjoy and follow your story.

This may mean more adjectives, adverbs, descriptive phrases, and so on.

Similarly, in other kinds of creative writing, like poetry or personal essays, you often want to get your ideas out and make people think.

So you might use some flowery language or even stream of consciousness writing.

Academic writing is another area where you may want to use more words.

This can include literature reviews, persuasive essays, research papers, opinion, or commentary pieces and more.

According to the publisher Rutledge Taylor and Francis Group, quote,

academic writing involves expressing your ideas, but those ideas need to be presented as a response to some other person or group.

And they also need to be carefully elaborated, well supported, logically sequenced, rigorously reasoned, and tightly stitched together, unquote.

Most importantly, academic writing involves thorough documentation of evidence, and sometimes you just need more words to do that well.

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