For many people, a key obstacle to communicating better is the tendency to be verbose. We use several words when we need only one meaningful word. We end up sounding overly long-winded (a self-defining example). Long-winded, a word that has teeth, is memorably self-descriptive. It means verbose or overly wordy in getting to the point. Overly long-winded therefore means overly, overly wordy. Why take the emphasis off a great word like long-winded by adding a redundant word like overly?
Posts Tagged ‘redundancy’
Overly long-winded
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013Carefully scrutinize pleonasm
Tuesday, July 24th, 2012Pleonasms are expressions that exhibit self-contained redundancy. Here are a few common examples: best ever, close proximity, completely destroyed, end result, false pretenses, may possibly, natural instinct, proceed ahead, and etc. Note that “and etc.” is also a pleonasm.
Language mixture redundancy
Thursday, July 12th, 2012Our everyday language is cluttered with some really funny things if you look for them. Being a Los Angeles native, I grew up with English being mixed with Spanish because many of the place names in the LA area are Spanish words including the name of our lovely city. Los Angeles means the angels in Spanish. Now, when the Anaheim Angels returned back to their original name, the Los Angeles Angels, they were asking us all to call them the the angels angels (if you want it all in English) or los los angeles angeles (if you want it all in Spanish).
Overly long-winded
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011For most people, the key obstacle to communicating better is the tendency to be verbose. We use several words when we need only one meaningful word. We end up sounding overly long-winded (a self-defining example). Long-winded, a word that has teeth, is memorably self-descriptive. It means verbose or overly wordy in getting to the point. Overly long-winded therefore means overly, overly wordy. Why take the emphasis off a great word like long-winded by adding a redundant word like overly?
Punctuation abuse
Thursday, September 29th, 2011Misuses of punctuation can also add redundancy and clutter in any writing. Two examples in today’s world are the overuse of “quotation marks” and the overuse of parentheses (these neat little devices that let you slide comments into a sentence).
Pleonasm awareness
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011Pleonasms are expressions that exhibit self-contained redundancy. Here are a few more common examples: best ever, close proximity, completely destroyed, end result, false pretenses, may possibly, natural instinct, proceed ahead, and etc. (note that “and etc.” is itself a pleonasm).
