Almost every teacher has written "wordy" in a margin and watched it have no effect. The comment identifies a symptom without explaining the cause or offering a way to fix it. Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing treats padding as a failure of attention, not a matter of style, which gives teachers a more useful way to think about it. Feedback that helps students notice what each word is doing is more likely to change their habits.

Students pad their writing for understandable reasons. Many have been given word counts and learned to meet them by stretching sentences, and some believe that longer, more formal-sounding phrases make them seem more intelligent. Others are simply uncertain about their ideas and surround them with qualifiers like "it could be argued that" to avoid committing. Understanding these motives helps teachers respond to the cause instead of scolding the symptom.

A helpful first step is to show students what padding looks like in their own work. A teacher can take a single sentence from a student paper, strike out the words that carry no meaning, and show that the sentence survives intact. For example, "In today's modern society, it is a fact that many students are struggling with stress" becomes "Many students struggle with stress." Seeing the difference makes the principle concrete.

Comments That Explain What to Cut and Why

Good wordiness feedback names the specific type of padding and models a revision. Some padding comes from empty openers, some from stacked prepositional phrases, and some from restating the same idea in slightly different words. When a teacher names the pattern, students can learn to spot it themselves. A single well-chosen example in the margin is more useful than a dozen underlines.

• Empty openers such as "it is important to note that" or "there are many ways in which."
• Stacked prepositional phrases that push the verb to the end of a long sentence.
• Doubled terms like "clear and obvious" or "each and every" that say one thing twice.
• Hedging language that appears so often that the writer never actually commits to a claim.
• Summary sentences that repeat what the previous sentence already established.

Making Concision Feel Like a Skill Instead of a Punishment

Students who hear only that their writing is too long can come to feel that their ideas are unwelcome. Teachers can reframe concision as a way of making ideas stronger, not smaller. A sentence stripped of filler lands harder, and a paragraph without repetition feels more confident. Pointing out strong, economical sentences in student work shows that the goal is impact, not brevity for its own sake.

Revision exercises can also lower the stakes. A teacher might give students a deliberately bloated paragraph and ask them to cut it by a third without losing any ideas, then compare the results as a class. Because the paragraph is not their own, students feel freer to experiment, and the skills they build transfer to their own drafts. This kind of practice is more effective than abstract advice.

Balancing Concision with Development

Not every long sentence is wordy, and not every short one is strong. A student writing a literary analysis may need several sentences to explain how a detail shapes a theme, and cutting too aggressively can leave the analysis thin. Teachers should be careful to distinguish padding from legitimate development. The test is whether each word or sentence adds information or reasoning that was not already there.

This distinction matters for students who are already underwriting. A student who produces three-sentence paragraphs may need to hear "say more," while a student who produces ten-sentence paragraphs may need to hear "say it once." Tailoring feedback to the individual prevents students from overcorrecting in the wrong direction.

Delivering Concision Feedback at Scale

Giving individualized wordiness feedback to a hundred or more students is demanding, since it requires reading closely enough to spot patterns in each paper. One approach is to build a small bank of comments that name the common patterns and model a fix, which the teacher can adapt rather than rewriting from scratch. This keeps feedback specific while saving time. Students notice the difference between a thoughtful comment and a stamped one, so the adaptation step matters.

AI-assisted grading tools can draft this kind of pattern-based feedback and attach it to the relevant sentences, leaving the teacher to review and refine. When the tool is aligned with the teacher's rubric, the comments reinforce what was taught in class. Teachers can then spend the time they save on conferences with the students who most need individual attention.