More anti-fluff campaigning

rogersgeorge on August 15th, 2010

Another example of that linguistic uselessness we call fluff:

… fitted with provision for a padlock to protect against any unauthorized tampering.

Two useless words here.  Find them before reading on.

“Unauthorized” is easy to remove. Tampering, by definition, is unauthorized, so you don’t need to say it. You also don’t need “any.” Take “any” out.  See? The meaning is the same. So our padlock is to protect against tampering, period.

Less work to read, better signal-to-noise ratio. Your readers will love you.

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