Down with Double-talking Wordiness
It's all too easy to generalize the way we do one thing is the way we do everything. Right or wrong, most people do it. Your writing is a good or bad example of what people see you do. If it's filled with double-talking or wordiness you've turned off your audience. Start avoiding this error right now. Today. Don't wait.
Double talking
"Sister Margaret Baptiste is the original founder ." Original founder is double-talk. Sister Margaret is either the founder or she isn't. Certainly, she's not the original founder. Here's another: Mix together. We can mix things. We can put things together. But you'll have to admit it's pretty hard to mix together at the same time. Advance warning. Warnings usually come in advance of an incident. Using advance and warning together provides no additional margin of safety. Trust me on this.
One more: Untrue lie. Father Flanigan over at St. Dom's hears confessions that he's sure are untrue. Some are outright lies. But I'd wager on even his best day he never hears fabrications so far-fetched that would qualify as untrue lies.
The point is that authors generate power from the precision of their writing. Double-talk squanders that power. It wastes your time and that of your readers. Don't do it.
Wordiness
Free gift; really and truly; reserved exclusively. The writer of these three word pairs meant them to emphasize the point. All she did was exhaust us poor readers. In fact, all gifts are free by definition. Really and truly means the same thing. Things that are reserved are indeed exclusive to the person for whom they're reserved. Am I right?
Some other wordiness errors I've come across in my 35 years of teaching such things: Sit down in the pew. A better usage would be simply: Sit in the pew. Sister Katherine cleaned up the vestibule. Instead, try, Sister Katherine vacuumed the vestibule. "We're all out of sacramental wine again," said Father Flannigan." Flannigan should have said, "The sacramental wine is gone." Actually he really should have admitted to serving it for evening cocktails, but that's another story.
The tricky thing about wordiness is that it often sounds fine when read aloud. But when reduced to words on a printed page, it looks and reads amateurish. Make your writing crisp and clean. Economize. Say what you want and then let your readers get on with their lives. Until next time, I'm Sister Mary Pat for Writers Resource Group.
Source: Painless Grammar, by Rebecca Elliott, Barron's Education 2009