Booher's Rules of Business Grammar - Dianna Booher 2009

Past experience—is there any other kind?
Reminders about redundancies

My most valuable learning experience in graduate school happened to be my most humiliating. Having read the first hundred pages of my master’s thesis, one of my thesis directors, a literary prize—winning novelist himself, handed back my novel with downcast eyes and mumbled something about “needs to be tightened.”

One line of his scathing review of my first draft came through distinctly: “Here’s a good page.”

“One good page?” I’d written what I considered more than 100 good pages.

He pulled page 67 from the stack—a lively scene of dialogue on which he’d scrawled “Excellent” across the top.

I stared at it for quite some time to determine what magic had been at play there, but missing elsewhere. I agreed that it looked brilliant—but no different from the other 99 pages he’d effectively relegated to the shredder.

“Would you edit a page to show me what’s so … redundant in the rest?”

Sullenly and without a word, he picked up a red pen and began to slash through words, phrases, and sentences as if they were road kill. Horrified as his pen obliterated metaphor after simile after prepositional phrase, I sat stunned when he handed me the edited page, about one-fourth its original length.

That process gave me both pain and pleasure. Watching him chop, splice, and shape significance out of the simple proved to be the most valuable 15 minutes of my writing career. Redundancy has been a dirty word ever since.

Everyone in the business world, it seems, understands the value of “getting to the point.” The problem? Identifying what to leave out and what to include. The good news? Most of the time, you don’t have to sacrifice information to be brief. Redundancy involves using unnecessary words to express the same idea. That’s the subject of this section—helping you root out the rot.

69. Past experience—is there any other kind?

LITTLE-WORD PADDING AND REDUNDANT IDEAS

Ideas have tremendous power if undiluted with superfluous words. Although the following clichés seep from the most seasoned writers on occasion, they clutter a speech, a conversation, or a document. Stamp them out so that your ideas stand out. The wordy phrases in the following chart can often be replaced by the word inside the parentheses.

Repetition of a key idea occasionally serves a purpose—to emphasize an idea or to bridge from one point to another. But needless redundancy can ruin otherwise brilliant thinking.

Memory tip

Think of little-word padding as layers of onion skin before you get to the usable part. Peel them from your writing.