How to remove irrelevant information, redundancy, and

wordiness

1. Always consider your readers2. Get to the point3. Have a variety of sentence lengths

but watch out for too many details in long sentences

4. Stay focused on the purpose of your writing

5. Use an outline to guide your thinking and your writing

6. Read, review, and revise again and again

1. Eliminate words that explain what is obvious already and give too much detail

2. Eliminate unnecessary modifiers (adverbs, adjectives, and unimportant details)

If the information is obvious to your readers there is no need to tell what is already known.Too much: Imagine standing with your feet shoulder-width apart, your hip square to home plate, and your elbow tucked in and holding a big wooden baseball bat with a fastball coming your way.

Just right: Imagine yourself in a batter’s stance getting ready to hit a fastball.

Don’t let the writing get filled up with too many details that the meaning of the writing gets lost. Too much: After making the biggest decision of my life in order to go to the final World Series game, I booked my flight, purchased my game ticket, reserved my hotel, printed my tickets and maps, and dreamed of what it would be like in the stadium.

Just right: The biggest decision of my life came down to the final World Series game.

Look for and remove:1.Repetitive wording2.Redundant pairs of words

Eliminate repeating words that have similar meanings.

Too much: The store owner considered the copier/scanner/printer combination an absolute necessity for their attaining success.

Just right: The store owner considered the copier/scanner/printer combination a necessity.

Eliminate words that imply each other (called pleonasms).

(actual) experience(advance) planning(advance) reservations(advance) warningall meet (together)(armed) gunmanat (12) midnightat (12) noonautobiography (of my life)(awkward) predicament(baby) boy was born(basic) fundamentalscease (and desist)cheap (price)(close) proximity

cold (temperature)commute (back and forth)consensus (of opinion)(difficult) dilemmaeach (and every)(empty) space(end) resultestimated (roughly) atfilled (to capacity)(free) gift(frozen) ice(general) publicgreen (in color)

join (together)(natural) instinctnever (at any time)(null and) void(pair of) twins(past) experience(poisonous) venom(pre-)recordedreason is (because)(regular) routine(small) speck(suddenly) explodedsurrounded (on all sides)(unexpected) surprise

Adapted from fun-with-words.com

Avoid using these words in academic writing as they do not further the purpose of any written work.

kind ofsort oftype ofreallybasicallyfor all intents and purposesdefinitelyactuallygenerallyindividualspecificparticular

Unnecess

ary E

XTRAS

ASK FOR HELP! SEEK OUT OTHERS TO READ, REVISE, EDIT, AND REVIEW YOUR WRITING. SEEING YOUR WORK

THROUGH ANOTHER PERSON’S EYES WILL ALLOW YOUR WRITING TO GROW, IMPROVE, AND BETTER SUIT YOUR

AUDIENCE.