“The speech of man is a magnificent and impressive thing when it surges along like a golden river, with thoughts and words pouring out in rich abundance.”

It is doubtful whether any of our modern partisans of Strunk and White would dare say such heresy; they would prefer something wrong and unoriginal, like “Words are best when they are few.”

Instead, this was set down by the great Renaissance thinker Desiderius Erasmus, as the first sentence of De Copia, a whole book on how to write abundantly.

Why has our attitude changed so much since then? Why is it that, rather than teaching how to actually write well, the style manuals of today seem obsessed with reducing the number of words and the length of sentences?

It is as if they believed reading was some sort of torture, and so writers should exhaust their powers to spare their audience as much of it as possible, or that words were the very essence of all that is wrong with the world, obliging conscientious writers to strenuously limit themselves.

And Erasmus was certainly not writing an unqualified endorsement of silly padding.

First, this style is not just about having a great quantity of words; the real goal is to have an immense variety of expression. And he endlessly cautions against taking the “abundant style” to an extreme, or becoming one of those who “display their jabbering in one variation after another, each worse than the last, as if they had entered a competition with themselves to speak just as barbarously as it is possible to speak.”

At the same time, he praises the “laconic brevity” for having its own sort of elegance.

However, there are times when a profuse, repetitive wealth of words can be quite beneficial.

For one thing, when done properly, it is beautiful. Erasmus graciously supplies us with a famous passage of over 10 dozen variations on “Your letter pleased me greatly.”

Imagine if people actually wrote “When I received your most gracious letter, boundless happiness occupied every recess of my soul,” or “Your communication poured vials of joy on my head.”

It is true that this sounds ridiculous, but is it actually bad, or do we just not like to express ourselves so freely due to cultural restraints?

If youths were in the habit of composing sonnets for their ladies, then probably such examples would be more highly looked upon.

Such a style may also be easier on the reader. It lengthens the space in which the idea is expressed, letting it be more properly digested and absorbed into the mind, rather than hurriedly gulping down a series of dehydrated aphorisms, which then expand within you and cause discomfort.

But wouldn’t it be more efficient to write with fewer words?

If that is the way you want it, many things could be more efficient. Workers could set up cots at their jobs.

Communication could be replaced with texting.

Many of our nutrients could be injected into the blood.

It would all be so efficient!

And if what we want from writing is efficiency, we can go much further than what we have now. Instead of this long, inefficient waste of paper, we could have something like this:

Erasmus wrote De Copia.

Style manuals = brevity.

Not just abundance.

Abundance = good.

Abundance = easier.

Inefficient, but who cares?

Abundance = memory.

Try it at home!

In certain ways, abundance may actually be more efficient. The modern theories will have you saying everything only once, with no redundancy.

However, “repetition is the mother of learning,” so reading the same thing expressed several times in different ways could actually help you to remember better, which is definitely more efficient than reading something and then forgetting it.

The diversity of expression will also help to hold things in memory, and while perhaps an excess could distract from the meaning, the phrase will remain in the mind to be recalled and considered later.

Certainly this does not mean abundance is the only style worth having; the world is filled with phrases and sentences that are glorious in their brevity.

But, in the world of sentence fragments and blog posts, one should remember that paucity is not final word.