More anti-fluff campaigning

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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First, I must speak in this fellow’s defense: He’s a contractor, and he drives a really straight nail. But he can’t write, or his web developer can’t, which is worse. Here’s a shot of some of the screen:

I cropped the heading and deleted the phone number to protect the guilty.

Here’s the first bad sentence:

We are a company that has been in business for over fifteen years making some wonderful home improvements to your biggest investment, your home.

It’s not true! He hasn’t touched my home! (ahem, well, actually, he did, and he did a fine job. But he’s not referring to me on his site, right?) And he certainly hasn’t been working on my home for 15 years. The whole sentence needs rewriting. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fix this poor, misshapen attempt at trying to sound experienced and competent.

Actually, that was the second bad sentence. He’s been in business for more than fifteen years. (I quibble. “Over” is common, but “more than” is better.)

Here’s another bad sentence.

The bottom photos display some of our work by just clicking the tabs below.

Who’s going to click the tabs? He says it’s the photos. Did you notice that moment of confusion when you read the sentence? That’s what you don’t want to happen when someone reads your writing.

The word “just”—it’s fluff (see previous post). Kill it.

The site has another problem, too. The tabs are independent from the pictures. You don’t even get a tab for each picture. And though the pictures have links under them (not underlined—they don’t look like links), they aren’t mentioned. He does mention the pictures, but clicking them has no effect.

That’s some of the top half of the first page. I could go on, but I won’t. This is enough curmudgeonly ranting for one post.

His web developer needs better writing and user interface skills, but the owner of the site is a very good, scrupulously honest, outstandingly capable builder. If you live in Delaware and need some work done to your house, drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch with him. He’ll take good care of you. Just don’t ask him to write anything.

“Fluff” is a technical term for unnecessary words. Okay, maybe it’s not so technical a term, but we agree that one syllable is better than six, right?

Fluff can appear so many ways in writing, the concept is best taught by example. Lots of examples, so expect to see more posts on this subject in the future. (I suppose the last three words of that sentence qualify as fluff, since they don’t change the meaning. When else would you expect to see more posts but in the future?)

Speaking of time, here’s an example of fluff that refers to the past:

[the customer] has a previous history of experience with our product.

Can you identify the fluff? Yup, history is always previous, so strike “previous.”

Here’s the best rule I can think of regarding fluff: If deleting it doesn’t change the meaning, delete it. You end up with concise, smooth prose that people love to read.

I invite you to comment with an example of fluff that you love to hate.

I just read a review of a new BMW motorcycle, to be revealed this fall. The article was articulate and clear, and the writer was obviously familiar with motorcycles. But he gave us a good lesson on homophones by illustrating how not to use two of them. (He also got “comprise” wrong every time he used that word, but that’s another lesson.)

A homophone is a word that sounds exactly like another word, but is spelled differently and has a different meaning. Such as blue, the color, and blew, past tense of blow. Another famous example is there, their, and they’re. Puhleeze—get those right! Because the spelling is different, a wrong homonym is easy to spot, so it’s a really good way to betray your lack of grasp of English.

Here’s one from the article:

“So, without further adieu…”

He meant “without further ado.”  Adieu means farewell, and ado means, well, commotion. “Adieu” is even harder to spell than “ado.” And he had the title of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing to guide him. I’m not sure why he went to all that work just to get it wrong.

Here’s the other:

“We have to make due for the moment with concept and design sketches seen here…” (BMW wouldn’t let him photograph the motorcycle.)

It’s “make do.” Both due and do have many meanings, but the correct word here is “do.”

I will say that it is an impressive motorcycle.

Bonus: If the words are spelled the same but have different origins, they are homographs (row a boat, lined up in a row), and if they are spelled the same but pronounced differently, they are heteronyms. (—a tear in some fabric, and a tear running down your cheek). Yes, you can have overlap. Depends on which dictionary you use, and who your English teacher was.

Here’s part of the caption under a photo on the front page of a local newspaper whose name shall remain unmentioned, but you’ll figure it out if you live near me. The context is a photo of a whale carcass.

“…to allow scientists to examine the creature for clues of how it may have died.”

Can you tell what’s wrong with this sentence?

“Clues” implies indefiniteness, and so does “may” (which is incorrect for two other reasons which I’ll get to in a moment). So we have a redundancy—an unnecessary repetition.

Now to decide which to remove, the “clues” or the “may.”

For one thing, they called it a carcass in the headline, and said “dead animal” elsewhere in the caption. The animal is clearly dead—no “may have died” here. Furthermore, they might not figure out why the animal died, so “clues” is appropriate.

So let’s go with “…to allow marine biologists to look for clues to how the creature died.”

Two more goodies from this sentence:

• First, note the change to a more specific term than “scientists.” Better writing.
• Second, use “might” to express doubt, not “may.” Save “may” for permission.

You may now go forth and write better.