Three Unnecessary Words

Usually unnecessary, anyway. Not counting “please,” see a recent post. My term for unnecessary words is fluff. Don’t write fluff.

Successfully. If you did something successfully, you did it. No need to add “successfully.” Here’s a recent headline I saw in Inside Climate News:

Iceland Experiment Successfully Turns CO2 Emissions into Rock

Some might argue that the word implies that the success was a surprise, but face it—the headline works just fine without “successfully,” and turning a gas into rock would be surprising in any case.

I see a lot of pages on which a person applies for a job. They usually end with something like

Congratulations. You have successfully submitted your application for the position of whatchamacallit with our company.

Why not say something like “We got your application and we’ll take a look at it.”? (see an earlier post about using the future tense to be vague.)

Different. When you mention two (or more) things, you often don’t gain anything by saying they’re different, unless the difference is the point. Usually, if they’re different enough to enumerate, you have already made them enough different that you don’t need to say so.

The farm has two different bulls.
The farm has two bulls.

His wife has twenty-four different chickens.
His wife has twenty-four chickens.

There are two ways to hold a trombone.
There are two different ways to hold a trombone.

Conciseness is a virtue. (Technically it’s “concision,” but it’s also a virtue to be clear.)

Totally. I was talking with my daughter (not the one who wrote the guest post) about unnecessary words, and she suggested “totally.” If something is so, it’s totally so unless you say otherwise. Since a lot of things can be incompletely so, be sure to say so.

The poor creature was dead
The poor creature was totally dead.
The poor creature was half dead.

Unless you’re  Valley Girl, totally.