Eliminate clutter from your prose

Redundancy and wordiness are weeds that can choke your verdant writings

Prose clutter is the greatest enemy of prose clarity. There are as many kinds of clutter as there are of weeds. Most have their hardiest life in business and political writing and speechifying, but two especially morbid growths can trip any but the most wary writer or editor.

The first type involves overwrought phrasing. The last and most dreadful legacy of Watergate, threatening to linger in our speech long after the speakers’ names have been forgotten, is “at this point in time” for “now” and “at that point in time” for “then.” But surely nobody, not even a politician, could sink into language as diseased as that without having sickened toward it on a diet of such lesser offenses as these:

Clutter

Clarity

accompanied by

with

answered in the negative

said no

at the present time

now

experience has indicated that

I have found

it is to be assumed that

I suppose