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Academic Writing > Terminology

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Glossary of Writing Terms

Circumlocution
From Latin circumlocutionem (nominative circumlocutio) "a speaking around" (the topic),
from circum- "around" + locutionem (nominative locutio) "a speaking," noun of action
from past participle stem of loqui "to speak". A loan-translation of Greek periphrasis.
Circumlocution refers to ambiguous or roundabout speech. Ambiguity means information
that can have multiple meanings. For example, governmental income support to poor
residents might be referred to as welfare. Roundabout speech refers to using many
words (such as a tool used for cutting things such as paper and hair) to describe
something for which a concise (and commonly known) expression exists (scissors). The
vast majority of definitions found in dictionaries are circumlocutory. Circumlocution is
often used by aphasics and language learners, where in the absence of a word (such as
"abuelo" [grandfather]) the subject can simply be described ("el padre de su padre" [the
father of your father]). Euphemism, innuendo, and equivocation are also types of
circumlocution.

Equivocation
From Old French equivocation, from Late Latin aequivocationem (nominative
aequivocatio), from aequivocus "of identical sound," from aequus "equal" + vocare "to
call". A loan-translation of Greek homonymia, literally "having the same name."
Equivocation is the use of ambiguous language with the purpose of avoiding telling the
truth or committing oneself. For example, a person might not want to divulge his
relationship status. Therefore, he talks about his significant other without making
concessions as to their relationship. Instead of saying "She made dinner for me last night",
an equivocational statement would be Dinner was already made for me last night.
Another example is the use of equivocation to deceive others without blatantly lying. For
example, if a mother asks her child to clean a throw rug and the child replies that they will
"hang the rug and beat it", rather than saying that they will "clean it", the child could mean
that they will forget about the rug (hang it) and quickly leave (beat it).

Euphemism
From Greek euphemismos "use of a favorable word in place of an inauspicious one,"
from euphemizein "speak with fair words" from eu- "good" + pheme "speaking,"
from phanai "speak". In ancient Greece, the superstitious avoidance of words of ill-omen
during religious ceremonies, or substitutions such as Eumenides "the Gracious Ones" for
the Furies. In English, it was a rhetorical term at first; the broader sense of "choosing a
less distasteful word or phrase than the one meant" is first attested in 1793.
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Euphemism, however, is only sometimes circumlocutory. For example, "Holy mother of

Jesus!" is a circumlocution of "Mary!", but "heck", while still euphemistic, is not a
circumlocution of "hell". Euphemistic circumlocution is also used to avoid saying
"unlucky words": words which are taboo for reasons connected with superstition. For
example, calling the devil "Old Nick", calling Macbeth "the Scottish Play" or saying
"baker's dozen" instead of thirteen.

Fumblerules
Fumblerules are humorous rules for writing, collected from teachers of English grammar.
They contain an example contrary to the advice they give. The term was coined in a list of
such rules compiled by William Safire on Sunday, 4 November 1979, in his column "On
Language" in the New York Times. Examples:

Dont never use no double negatives.

Eschew obfuscation.
A preposition is never something to end a sentence with.
Avoid clichs like the plague.
The passive voice should never be employed.
You should not use a big word when a diminutive would suffice.
It is bad to carelessly split infinitives.
About those sentence fragments.

Grandiloquence
From Latin grandis (great) and loqui (to speak); complex speech or writing judged to be
pompous or bombastic diction. It is often used by politicians. Warren G. Harding, the 29th
President of the United States, was noted as a grandiloquent speaker, with a florid style
unusual even in his era:
America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not
revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the
dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in
internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality...

A Democrat leader, William Gibbs McAdoo described Harding's speeches as an army of

pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.

Graphomania
From Greek graphein "to write," and mania "madness, frenzy; enthusiasm, inspired
frenzy; mad passion, fury," related to mainesthai "to rage, go mad." Also known as
scribomania, it refers to an obsessive impulse to write. When used in a specifically
psychiatric context, it labels a morbid mental condition which results in writing rambling
and confused statements, often degenerating into a meaningless succession of words or
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even nonsense and called then graphorrhea. Outside the psychiatric definitions, the word
is used more broadly to label the urge and need to write excessively, whether professional
or not. According to Milan Kundera, graphomania is the groundless claim of being a
writer:
"The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, child bearers, lovers,
murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without
exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go
down the streets and shout: 'We are all writers!'"
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Kunderas feeling about graphomania may be explained by the fact that such a pejorative
meaning of graphomania is actually often used in Post-Soviet block to denote foolish,
unprofessional and excessive writings (not only in the form of literature, but also science),
while logorrhea as a noun (with its negative, pejorative meaning) is not as often used. The
word logophiliac is used in a similar disparaging fashion by cognoscenti in the US.

Hypergraphia
Hypergraphia is a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write. Forms
of hypergraphia can vary in writing style and content. It is a symptom associated with
temporal lobe changes in epilepsy, which is the cause of the Geschwind syndrome, a
mental disorder. Possible structures that may have an effect on hypergraphia when
damaged due to temporal lobe epilepsy are the hippocampus and Wernicke's area. Aside
from temporal lobe epilepsy, chemical causes may also be responsible for inducing
hypergraphia.
Both Vincent van Gogh and Fyodor Dostoevsky are reported to have been affected by
hypergraphia. It has been suggested that the poet Robert Burns was a sufferer. Lewis
Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, is said to have had hypergraphia. In his
lifetime he wrote over 98,000 letters varying in format. The letters were written
backwards, in rebus, and in different patterns, such as the Mouse Tail in the former
book.

Logorrhea
In psychology, logorrhea (from Greek [logorrhoia]; from [logos],
meaning "word", and [rhoia], meaning "flow") is a communication disorder,
sometimes classified as a mental illness, resulting in incoherent talkativeness. It is present
in a variety of psychiatric and neurological disorders including aphasia, localized cortical
lesions in the thalamus, mania, or most typically in catatonic schizophrenia. Its causes
remain poorly understood, but appear to be localized to frontal lobe structures known to
be associated with language. Examples might include talking or mumbling monotonously,
either to others, or more likely to oneself. It is a symptom of an underlying illness, and
should be treated by a medical professional.
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In linguistics and editing, the term is often used pejoratively to describe prose that is
hard to understand because it is needlessly complicated or uses excessive jargon. Writers
in academic fields which concern themselves mostly with the abstract, such as philosophy,
especially postmodernism, often fail to include extensive concrete examples of their ideas;
so an examination of their work might lead one to believe that it is all nonsense, hence the
pejorative epithet pomobabble (i.e., postmodernist babble). For example, the
Michigan Law Review published a 229-page parody of postmodern writing titled
Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak and Constitutional Meaning for the Uninitiated.
The article consists of extremely complicated and highly context sensitive self-referencing
narratives about the article itself. The text is peppered with an absolutely excessive
number of parenthetical citations and asides, which is supposed to mock the cluttered
postmodernist style of writing.
The term is also sometimes less precisely applied to unnecessarily wordy speech in
general; this is more usually referred to as prolixity.

Obfuscation
From Latin obfuscatus, past participle of obfuscare "to darken," from ob "over" + fuscare
"to make dark," from fuscus "dark." Obfuscation (or beclouding) is the hiding of intended
meaning in communication, making communication confusing, willfully ambiguous, and
harder to interpret. It may be used for many purposes. Doctors have been accused of using
jargon to conceal unpleasant facts from a patient; American author Michael Crichton
claimed that medical writing is a "highly skilled, calculated attempt to confuse the reader".
B. F. Skinner, noted psychologist, commented on medical notation as a form of audience
control, which allows the doctor to communicate to the pharmacist things which might be
opposed by the patient if they could understand it.
Eschew obfuscation, is a humorous fumblerule used by English teachers and
professors when lecturing about proper writing techniques. Literally, the phrase means
avoid being unclear, but the use of relatively uncommon words causes confusion,
making the phrase an example of irony.

Onomatopoeia
From Greek onomatopoeia (); from meaning name and
meaning I make is a word that phonetically imitates the source of the sound it describes.
Examples include animal noises such as "oink", "meow", "roar" or "chirp".
Onomatopoeias are not the same across all languages; they conform to some extent to the
broader linguistic system they are part of; hence the sound of a clock may be tick tock
in English, d d in Mandarin, or katchin katchin in Japanese.
Although in English the term means the imitation of a sound, in Greek the compound
word () means making or creating names. For words that imitate sounds
the term (echomimetico) or echomimetic is used.

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Oxymora
An oxymoron (plural oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes apparently
contradictory elements. The term is derived from the 5th century Latin "oxymoron",
which is derived from the Ancient Greek: (oxus) sharp, keen + (mros)
"dull, stupid", making the word itself an oxymoron. Oxymora may include inadvertent
errors such as ground pilot. However, they may also be intentionally crafted to reveal a
paradox. For example, Wilfred Owen's poem The Send-off refers to soldiers leaving for
the front line, who lined the train with faces grimly gay. The oxymoron grimly gay
highlights the contradiction between how the soldiers feel and how they act: though they
put on a brave face and act cheerfully, they feel grim.

Periphrasis
From Latin periphrasis "circumlocution," from Greek periphrasis, from periphrazein
"speak in a roundabout way," from peri- "round about" + phrazein "to express". In
linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which grammatical meaning is expressed by one or
more free morphemes (typically one or more function words accompanying a content
word), instead of by inflectional affixes or derivation. Periphrastic forms are analytic,
whereas the absence of periphrasis is a characteristic of synthesis. While periphrasis
concerns all categories of syntax, it is most visible with verb catenae. The verb catenae of
English are highly periphrastic.

Plain English
Plain English (sometimes referred to more broadly as plain language) is a generic term
for communication in English that emphasizes clarity, brevity, and the avoidance of
technical languageparticularly in relation to official government or business
communication.
The goal is to write in a way that is easily understood by the target audience: clear and
straightforward, appropriate to their reading skills and knowledge, free of wordiness,
clich and needless jargon. It often involves using native Anglo-Saxon, or Germanic,
words instead of those derived from Latin and Greek.

Pleonasm
From Greek (pleonasmos) from (pleon) meaning "more, too much"
(i.e., too-much-ism); the use of more words than is necessary for clear expression. It can
take the form of purely semantic redundancies that are standard usage in a language and
thus unconscious to the user (e.g., the French question "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" meaning
"What is it?" which translates literally as "What is it that it is?"). In most cases, pleonasm
is a question more of style and usage than of grammar.
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[There exist] many sentences [that could serve to] illustrate [the occurrence of]
pleonasm, but because [of the fact that] space is limited and [in order] to save
time, this will [have to] do.

Prolixity
Prolixity is the use of confusing, verbose sentences which go into endless petty details,
without selection or perspective. It is often done with manipulative intent: to confuse and
mislead (obfuscation), to disguise the actual nature of a position or fact (euphemism), or
to persuade in politics or religion (propaganda). It is especially common in business,
political, and even academic language that is intended to sound impressive (or to be vague
so as to mask what is actually being said). For example:
This quarter we are presently focusing with determination on an all-new,
innovative, integrated methodology and framework for rapid expansion of
customer-oriented external programs designed and developed to bring the
company's consumer-first paradigm into the marketplace as quickly as possible.

Redundancy
In linguistics, redundancy means the use of more words when expressing an idea than
necessary; superfluity; a needless repetition in language; wordiness; verbiage. It can be
thought of as the equation A + A + A = A (not 3A). It is a general term which can be
divided into five subtypes: (1) Tautology, (2) Pleonasm, (3) Superfluous Pairs, (4) Stating
the obvious, and (5) Common knowledge.

Sesquipedalianism
Sesquipedalianism is a linguistic style that involves the use of long words. Horace coined
the phrase sesquipedalia verba in his Ars Poetica. It is an agglutinative exocentric
compound of sesqui and pes, meaning one and a half feet long, with reference to the
length of a word. The earliest recorded usage in English of sesquipedalian is in 1656,
and of 'sesquipedalianism', 1863. The sesquipedalian may be seeking (1) lexical precision;
(2) to demonstrate the benefits of erudition; (3) to stifle intellectual challenge. The
usefulness of sesquipedalianism has been questioned since the origins of the term: Horace
reminds the reader that 'gigantic expressions', along with rants, are set aside by characters
'if they have a mind to move the heart of the spectator with their complaint'. More recently
it has been alleged that it is a form of obscurantism that seeks 'by using logomachinations
to divert discussion to the establishment of the opponent's comprehension of the
vocabulary'.
Some writers may feel that using long and obscure words may make them seem more
intelligent. A recent study from the psychology department of Princeton University found
that this was not the case. Dr. Daniel M. Oppenheimer did research which showed that
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students rated those with short, concise text, as being texts written by the most intelligent
authors. But those who used long words or complex font types were seen as less
intelligent.

Tautology
In grammar, a tautology (from Greek tauto, the same and logos, word/idea) is an
unnecessary repetition of meaning, using multiple words to effectively say the same thing
(often originally from different languages). It is considered a fault of style and was
defined by A Dictionary of Modern English Usage as saying the same thing twice. If an
idea is unintentionally repeated (e.g., end results), it may be described as tautological. It
often hinders reader comprehension and undermines the writer's credibility.

Verbiage
The use of mere words without thought; speech or writing that uses too many words or
excessively technical expressions.

Verbosity
Verbosity (also called wordiness, prolixity, grandiloquence, garrulousness, expatiation,
and logorrhea.) refers to speech or writing which is deemed to use an excess of words.
Corresponding adjectival forms are verbose, wordy, prolix, grandiloquent, garrulous, and
logorrheic. The opposite of verbosity is succinctness that can be found in plain language
(or plain English) and laconism.
William Strunk wrote about the balance between being clear and being concise in 1918. He
advised "Use the active voice: Put statements in positive form; Omit needless words."
Mark Twain (18351910) wrote "generally, the fewer the words that fully communicate or
evoke the intended ideas and feelings, the more effective the communication."
Ernest Hemingway (18991961), the 1954 Nobel prizewinner for literature, defended his
concise style against a charge by William Faulkner that he "had never been known to use a
word that might send the reader to the dictionary." Hemingway responded by saying, "Poor
Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the
ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and
those are the ones I use."
Blaise Pascal wrote in 1657, "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time
to make it shorter."
Julius Caesar, Roman general (100 BC 44 BC) spoke concisely of one of his military
successes: Veni, Vidi, Vici. ("I came, I saw, I conquered.").

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