Flashback time:
One of the most important and beneficial trainings I ever underwent as a young writer was trying to script a comic. I had to cut down all of my dialogue to fit into speech bubbles. I was staring closely at each sentence and striking out any word I could.
“But then I paid for Twitter!”
Ah, but each additional sentence strikes home the point of absurd over-abundance!
Quite poetically, the sin of verbosity is commited to create the illusion of considered thought and intelligence, in the case of hpmor literally by stacking books.
Amusingly him describing his attempt as “striking words out” rather than “rewording” or “distilling”, i think illustrates his lack of editing ability.