Wordiness

I was looking through Ilan's blog because he always has some interesting things to say in his blogs. As I was doing so, I saw that for the fifth chapter, he took a sentence from the book that he felt was wordy. I totally agree with him and decided that it was appropriate to write a blog about it. "And that it would probably be the first time in the lives of most people there that they had ever been in darkness that was total." (Slaughterhouse-Five PDF File)

My version: It was probably the first time that most people saw total darkness.

I don't even know if my version is correct, but I really think that for such a simple statement, the sentence is too complex and confusing. After the writer's workshop class that we had on wordiness, I've been constantly looking for sentence that were to wordy. I had never really thought of it as such a bad thing, but now I am starting to understand how much it affects one's writing. A wordy paragraph is not as easy to understand as if it is neat and easy to understand. I've also noticed that it doesn't mean that every long sentence is wordy, there are some sentences who have a lot of information, but is written in a clear way.