Are you wordy? Recognize the signs

Scan your writing for the following symptoms of wordiness:

• Being” verbs. You’ll have to use them sometimes, of course, but they often slow the pace of a sentence. Compare “still, dustgreen trees” to “trees that are a dusty-colored green.”
• Passive constructions. Passive voice, which occurs when the subject of the sentence receives action rather than performing it, inevitably clogs sentences. Compare the flies that “are killed by the impact” versus the flies that simply “die.”
• Filler words. We writers love words…maybe a little too much. Are all of our words necessary? Play a game with your WIP: take a few sentences and try to rewrite them to be half as long, a third as long, even just an eighth as long. Experiment with what words you can cut without losing meaning.
• Read the rest of the article by Sarah Baughman at Suzannah's site at wrap http://writeitsideways.com
• However. And this from me. You must be careful not to make your book into a synopsis of the story you tell and your characters cardboard people. The reader still needs to know how your characters think and feel, their despair and joy, to enter their minds so the reader becomes one with the character and to the reader that character becomes a person. 

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Miss Emma Napier helps her friend escape a forced marraige. She meets Lord Desborough who is looking for a temporary wife. His lordship thinks Emma is the perfect choice.