Get Rid of Extra Words!
Good writing is concise. That means you got rid of extra words but didn’t get rid of too many words. (Getting rid of too many words is being terse.) Okay, we have a couple synonyms here that involve not being concise. Definitions after the comics.
- Redundancy—needless repetition; “do it over again.”
- Pleonasm—unnecessary words; “on a daily basis” instead of “daily.”
- Tautology—the same thing twice; “he was prepared and ready.”
I’ll let you decide which of these are in the comics.
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I Don’t Think This is True
But I’m not going to bother to look it up. Seems to me that we didn’t use punctuation back then.
I think most of our punctuation appeared in the middle ages.
By the way, don’t forget to pronounce that second “s.” It’s aster riSk, not aster rick.
Expletives are Real
When I learned about the parts of speech in school, my teacher included expletives in her list.
Maybe this teacher just liked matched columns in the list.
Expletives are expressions of surprise or similar strong emotion, and they generally appear all by themselves and are generally punctuated with an exclamation point. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to make a list of them…
Parallelism is Good
When you have a compound subject or predicate, especially when they’re connected with a coordinating conjunction, they should have the same grammatical structure. Panel 1: the bird gets it wrong:
The bird should have said “…look good as well as taste good.” This is a fairly common mistake. Be alert for them when you read. Then you can join the grammar police!
Yes, “as well as” counts as a coordinating conjunction.
One of My Rules!
Well, rule of thumb, that is. A recommendation, really. Third panel. He stated the rule a bit more strongly than I do.
My rule is that your writing is generally better if you can think of a good verb and dispense with the adverb. Unless your emphasis is on the adverb, maybe.
