Weed out the need-less

If you enjoy chips or biscuits, I bet you like them crispy. The same is true for sentences. If you tend to use words or phrases that fill the sentence but do not advance the idea much, the reader will feel like chewing soggy fries or cookies. Here’s the advice for you. Expunge, edit out, eliminate and scratch all such unnecessary verbal expressions.

Which sentence do you like better: the last sentence or the following one? 

Omit unnecessary words.

One of the best books on style is by the linguist Steven Pinker: The Sense of Style: the Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. He calls redundant phrases “morbidly obese” and offers the following as examples alongside the “healthy” alternatives in the right-hand column.

To recap, “redundancy”, the technical term for needless words, produces verbiage or bloated prose. One of the best ways to rid yourself of stylistic flaws (such as redundancy) is to expose yourself to models of excellent prose. Anyone whose primary feed is The Economist or The Atlantic is less likely to write bad prose than someone whose meat of choice is The News or DAWN.