Verbosity

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Verbosity is the product of making a text verbose, a process which is the exact opposite of being concise. A verbose text is one that has a larger than necessary amount of words, usually the inflation being due to a higher number of adjectives. Verbose texts tend to be more descriptive, but at the cost of blurring the information, to the point where excessively verbose texts have only description, and are often unreadable.

Individual words which are excessive, and unnecessary, are referred to as pleonasms, whereas incidents of excessive verbosity are referred to as logorrhoea.

Verbosity is also a term used to describe a feature of screen-reading programs that support vision-impaired computer users. Speech verbosity controls enable users to choose how much speech feedback they wish to hear. Specifically, verbosity settings allow users to construct a mental model of web pages displayed on their computer screen. Based on verbosity settings, a screen-reading program informs users of certain formatting changes, such as when a frame or table begins and ends, where graphics have been inserted into the text, or when a list appears in the document.

Some screen reading programs also include language verbosity, which automatically detects verbosity settings related to speech output language. For example, if a user navigated to a website based in the United Kingdom, the text would be read with a British accent.

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