Redundancy

An important part of good expository writing is to be concise. That means no more words than necessary. The rule of thumb is, “If you can remove the word without changing the meaning, remove it.” I wrote about this before, but I’ve since I’ve been using comics lately to illustrate some points, here’s one , Tina’s Groove, about redundancy:

Sigh. The comic is even an example of itself. It’s there twice. You don’t need me to explain any of the redundancies, do you?

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Once upon a time I had the opportunity to listen to a Peter Paul and Mary concert. During one of the periods of banter between songs, Peter or Paul (I never could tell those guys apart) commented about the ridiculousness of saying “hot water heater.” After all, you heat cold water. The other day I ran into this incorrect usage in an article that I had better expectations of, but now I can’t find it. (If I do, it’ll appear here and I’ll remove this remark.)

Similar redundancies are to say ATM machine and PIN number. Redundancies both. You can usually get away with things like this in your spoken English, but don’t do it in your writing!

More recently I ran into another superfluous word in an article in Inside Climate News quoting an oil pipeline company. Maybe I should say oil pipeline company lawyer. Nearly every lawyer I’ve met thinks they can write, but they can’t.

Gallagher ultimately accepted a $16,000 “close proximity” fee, on top of $6,400 for the land that Enbridge took.

Proximity means “closeness,” not “measure of distance.” A bomb with a proximity fuse goes off when it gets close. It’s redundant to say “close proximity.”

I won’t venture to guess whether Inside Climate News put the phrase in quotes to be precise, or to point out the redundancy.

That’s a misleading title. Sorry. My marketing instinct got the better of me. It should be Parallelism in sentence construction. Not as catchy, is it? Here’s our example sentence:

When mixed with existing soil, it improves water and nutrient retention as well as increasing the population and activity levels of beneficial microbes.

Can you see the mistake? The conjunction “as well as” does this to a lot of people. We have a sentence with a compound predicate. The first part is “improves water retention” and the other part is (ak! horrors!) “increasing the population …” The verbs in a parallel construction like this are supposed to be the same form. Here’s how the sentence should go:

When mixed with existing soil, it improves water and nutrient retention as well as increases the population and activity levels of beneficial microbes.

See? It improves and increases. That’s correct parallelism. If you watch your parallel constructions, your writing will hold together better, and people in the know will see that you pay attention to what you’re writing, and will grant you more credibility than if you had made the goof.  (See? “will see” and “will grant”).

What happens if you change the second predicate into an adverb phrase?

When mixed with existing soil, it improves water and nutrient retention,  increasing the population and activity levels of beneficial microbes.

It’s not parallel now—the participle is subordinate. Hence, “increasing” is now okay.

Bonus item: Do you see the redundancy in the sentence? What word could you leave out without changing the meaning of the sentence?

This sentence, by the way, is about biochar, or homemade charcoal, which I wrote about in my personal blog, Mushrooms to Motorcycles, when I made some a while back. I’m planning to make another batch soon—I have loads of scrap wood from the addition we’re building on our house. Hmm. I need to write a post about that, too.

This guy’s biochar retort is a lot nicer looking than mine. I suspect he hasn’t used it yet.

(My apologies to those of you who got the unfinished version of this post a couple days ago. I clicked the wrong button, and I could not stop the RSS feed.)

So many of these little mistakes exist, I would make you cross-eyed if I tried to cover more than about three at a time, and you would forget most of them anyway. So here are three, and they are similar. That should help you remember them. They all involve using unnecessary words.

I call these sorts of things the Hard Part of Writing, by the way, because they are items that require you to think about what you’re writing to get them correct.

Rule 1. When you use “additional,” be sure you need it. I recently read an article about being persuasive. Among the article’s good advice was a comment to use a headline, and then write a paragraph that supports the headline with additional details. What’s wrong with that? A headline does not have details. It’s a headline! The details are not additional. So:

Write a headline, then write a paragraph that supports the headline with details.

That’s not only cleaner, it’s truer.

Rule 2. When you use “different,” be sure you need it. You encounter this mistake when you see writers make informal lists. “Ten different people friended me  after I told my doggie story.” Get rid of that “different,” and you have a cleaner sentence. It goes without saying (if you think) that you wouldn’t be writing about ten of the same person. Since they have to be different people, you don’t have to say so.

Ten people friended me after I told my doggie story.

I could have used “circled me” in the example, but then it would have been a hundred people, and some of them would have been really different, if you know what I mean.

Rule 3. The third little mistake is saying what you’re going to say. Perhaps you see these unnecessary words most in expressions such as “I’d like to say (thank you for all these wonderful gifts)…”  and “I just want to say that (you’re the best audience ever)…” These introductory expressions are unnecessary. (I was going to say “totally unnecessary” but “totally” is as unnecessary as “different”). They are a way of stepping back from actually saying what you have on your mind by saying that you’re going to say it. Just say what you want to say.

Thank you for all these wonderful gifts. You are the best audience ever.

More personal, direct, and straightforward, isn’t it? Since this is the Hard Part of Writing, I have an assignment for you: Write a short paragraph of nice things about someone, and see how many unnecessary words you can leave out. You have permission to send it to them.

Redundancy and fluff are common mistakes, and I mention these errors in this humble site rather often. Here’s another good example. It’s from the fascinating book, Shock of Gray by Ted. C. Fishman. The book is about the sociology of aging. Here’s the subtitle: The aging of the world’s population and how it pits young against old, child against parent, worker against boss, company against rival, and nation against nation. Quite a mouthful. Here’s a comment about Tokyo.

Tokyo has become the one city in the world where one’s youth lasts longest, while at the same time it is a city where time passes so quickly that Tokyoites are near middle age before they know it.

I found this picture on a page titled "Tokyo with kids - things to do"

All the words in this sentence are grammatically correct. But if you reflect, you might notice some unnecessary content. I call this sort of thing the hard part of writing, because on a superficial level, the writing is perfectly correct. What it says isn’t quite right.

It has to do with what you mean when you use the superlative, in this case “longest.” When you compare the lengths of pieces of string, how many can be the longest? Presumably one. Which mountain is highest? Only one. The point of the superlative is to point out the one thing that is at the top of whatever heap you’re measuring. In this case it’s the city where one’s youth lasts longest, and that is Toyko. You don’t need that fifth word in the sentence, “one.” Take it out, and the sentence means exactly the same thing, and it’s a little tighter, less wordy.

You might object that my complaint here is hardly earth-shaking, and you would be right. I’ll even grant that the “one” was put in the sentence to add emotional impact to the statistic. I hope, however, you see the benefit of reflecting on your writing, and thinking about what you say. Chop out what you don’t need. Your readers will thank you.