During my sophomore year in college, a teaching assistant described my writing as wordy. He might have said "verbose” or “flowery.” This was the same teaching assistant who circled the word “disparate” and wrote “not a word” in the margin of another one of my papers and I was like, You, sir, are an idiot. Of course I didn’t say anything because he was in charge of my grade, but seriously, what was the UCLA English Department teaching its grad students in 1987?

The teaching assistant was dead wron...