Sigh. Another Redundancy

My experience with small town newspapers tells me that they have a lot of weakness in their proofreading and copy editing departments. Redundancy is a pretty common error.

Redundancy is when you repeat yourself unnecessarily. Here’s today’s example:

In order to provide the building with some tender loving care, Magin enlisted the help of Jackson, Wyoming, business MD Roofing to help tackle some of the work that needed to be put into the house to restore it back to its original state.

“Restore it” is enough. you don’t need “back.”

While I’m being a curmudgeon, I’ll mention that the first two words (“In order”) aren’t necessary, and although the “it” after “restore” is grammatically correct, a noun (the house) is better than a pronoun.

Harrumpf.

Oh. A picture of the place:

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is a pretty good source of intellectual humor.

Do you see the redundancy?

Well, I think it’s funny. When you have some time, look up “quine.” Or maybe “quine’s paradox.” Willard Van Orman Quine invented a type of self-referential sentence.

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.

First, see the second panel:

It’s not /vick chu als/! I remember my high school English teacher saying it was pronounced /vittles/. Well, I just ran into the word, so I looked it up. Yup, it’s /vittles/!

I may as well add that the king didn’t need to say “old crone.” Crones are already old, so “crone” is sufficient.

Now I’m in the mood for ribs.

Well, technically they’re unnecessary (aka redundant), but maybe not, given the context. We can use extra words for emphasis even though the words aren’t actually necessary.

I think “at this time” is also unnecessary…