Eliminate redundancies - Tighten wordy sentences - Clarity

Rules for writers, Tenth edition - Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers 2021

Eliminate redundancies
Tighten wordy sentences
Clarity

Long sentences are not necessarily wordy, nor are short sentences always concise. A sentence is wordy if it can be tightened without loss of meaning.

16a Eliminate redundancies.

Redundancies such as cooperate together, yellow in color, or basic essentials are a common source of wordiness. There is no need to say the same thing twice.

Image

Image

Though modifiers ordinarily add meaning to the words they modify, they are redundant when their meanings are suggested by other words in the sentence.

Image

Image