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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Or concision if you want to be fancy. I got this from a Facebook post, so no useful credit.

Rules of thumb:

• if you can leave out a word without changing the meaning, leave it out.
• If you think of a shorter way to say something, say it that way.

PS—the picture disappeared from Facebook. Sorry. You can find another post on this subject dated August 4, 2021.

Being concise is one of my five gold rules about good tech writing. (You can request an essay about those five rules over on the right.) Redundancy, needless repetition, is the opposite of conciseness. Here’s a comic about it. I’d hire her!

The only place for redundancy is poetry.

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know I preach against redundancy, aka unnecessary repetition. Such as “do it over again.” (Either “over” or “again,” but not both.) We call this being concise.

Well, maybe I just ran into a case where the redundancy is necessary!

After all, just “drink” all by itself implies drinking booze, right?

I’ve given examples of not being concise before. Here’s another. Don’t do this. (See the previous post.)

Remember the rule: If you can leave a word out, leave it out!