Eliminate clutter from your prose
Redundancy and wordiness are weeds that can choke your verdant writings.
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
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