Talk About Redundancy!

He calls it “fat,” I call it “fluff.”

Please don’t do this!

BTW, if you’re a teacher, I recommend this comic. The cartoonist is a teacher, and he’s pretty good.

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I haven’t mentioned fluff in writing for a while. Fluff is one or more unnecessary words in what you (or someone) writes. You can also call this redundancy in writing. I hear people say “tiny little” a lot, as if it were one word. Here’s something similar:

Meteors are tiny dust-size particles of rock and metal that Earth passes through as it orbits the Sun.

http://www.astronomy.com/magazine/observing/2018/08/party-with-the-perseids

Take out “tiny”! Or take out “dust-size.”

If I may also wax astronomical, I shall add that the sentence describes particles that are too small. I don’t think a dust particle has enough molecules to create a flash of light bright enough to make a streak seen over a large area dozens of miles away.

The time has come to write about fluff again—I ran into a comic on the subject. We curmudgeons also call fluff redundancy, wordiness, and unnecessary verbiage. Probably some saltier terms, too. Fluff is the antithesis of conciseness, one of my gold rules for good writing.

I’ve featured this gal in Jump Start before. Several times, actually; that one was just a sample.

So when you write, look over what you wrote. (You always proofread, don’t you?) Do you see any words that you could delete without changing the meaning? Delete ’em! Your readers will thank you.

Actually several times over the past several years. (Search on redundan or fluff to see more.) Extra words go contrary to my rule about good expository writing, to be concise. So I suppose I don’t really need to mention it again, but this Wrong Hands comic has some good examples of what not to do. Besides, repetition is the mother of learning, right?

No comic today, but something to think about.

My second gold rule of writing is to be correct. This from This Day in History for July 20:

In December of the same year, Apollo 8 took three astronauts to the dark side of the moon and back, and in March 1969 Apollo 9 tested the lunar module for the first time while in Earth orbit.

The whole moon is dark half the time! They went to the FAR side of the moon! I know, “dark” is a synonym for “unknown,” and I presume they were using a professional writer who decided to write, um, informally. Still, why not be accurate?

While I’m at it, here’s another example of bad writing from the same article:

After traveling 240,000 miles in 76 hours, Apollo 11 entered into a lunar orbit on July 19.

“Into” is unnecessary. (It’s redundant. “Entering” includes the idea of going into.) I call this kind of mistake “fluff.” It goes against my third rule, to be concise. If you don’t need a word, don’t use it.

Double harrumpf.