overcompression

If Smith, bearing a valise freshly stuck with labels, walks up the street with an air at once confident and curious, I may infer that Smith has returned to town after a considerable absence. In a thousand little ways the skilled writer may guide his readers to their own deductions and, while effecting an economy of space, confer pleasure upon them in so doing. Yet there is relatively little of this swift and confident style. Only good writers seem to possess it and not all of them, for writers there are whose substance interests despite defective artistry. Doubtless the vicious habit of editors of paying a fixed rate per word rather than a price dependent upon compactness and intensity has much to do with the prevailing cult of wordiness and obviousness. Certainly nine-tenths of creditable short stories might be improved by cutting away superfluities and by the substitution of suggestion for explanation. Clearness is, however, the first essential and must not be sacrificed. Kipling, whose suggestive short cuts in style are worthy the study of any writer, is sometimes rather obscure by reason of overcompression.

1913, Carl Henry Grabo, The Art of the Short Story, C. Scribner's Sons, pages 230-231

Recalculation of the atomic composition for the several lattice measurements produces the straight line function in the plot shown herewith which replaces Fig. 4 of the article. Copper-gold alloys therefore are like the copper-nickel, gold-silver, tungsten-molybdenum and other continuous solid solution series, and do not exhibit the overcompression of the solid solutions of pairs of metals which show limited solubility with formation of intermetallic compounds such as copper-zinc, copper-tin, copper-aluminum, silver-zine and silver-cadmium.

1918, Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, McGraw Hill Company, page 576