Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling.
This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount of words. It is the most literal way to spell it out.
A big part of good writing is how to convey more meaning without more words.
Bad writing would be to add more clauses or sentences to say that our subject was confidently striding, conspiratorially sidling, or angrily tromping, and adding much more of those sentences and phrases soon gets tiresome for the reader. Better writing carries the heavier load in the same size sentence by using better word choice, metaphor, etc. (and doing it without going too far the other way and making the writing unintelligibly dense).
Think of "spelling it out literally" like the thousand-line IF statements, whereas good writing uses a more concise function to produce the desired output.
Those examples were simple, so it’s less of an issue, but if the words you use are so crazy that the reader has to read slower or has to stop to think about what you mean…then you aren’t making things more concise even if you are using less words.
For sure! Every author should know their audience and write for that audience.
An author's word choices can certainly fail to convey intended meaning, or convey it too slowly because they are too obscure or are a mismatch for the the intended audience — that is just falling off the other side of the good writing tightrope.
At technical paper is an example where the audience expects to see proper technical names and terms of art. Those terms will slow down a general reader who will be annoyed by the "jargon" but it would annoy every academic or professional if the "jargon" were edited out for less precise and more everyday words. And vice versa for the same topic published in a general interest magazine.
So, an important question is whether you are part of the intended audience.
Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling.
This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount of words. It is the most literal way to spell it out.
A big part of good writing is how to convey more meaning without more words.
Bad writing would be to add more clauses or sentences to say that our subject was confidently striding, conspiratorially sidling, or angrily tromping, and adding much more of those sentences and phrases soon gets tiresome for the reader. Better writing carries the heavier load in the same size sentence by using better word choice, metaphor, etc. (and doing it without going too far the other way and making the writing unintelligibly dense).
Think of "spelling it out literally" like the thousand-line IF statements, whereas good writing uses a more concise function to produce the desired output.