This is a quick one to plug a short Medium article by Benjamin Dreyer. When I’m editing my first draft of a novel, I find that the thing I’m doing the most is removing unnecessary words. These are the words that you can get rid of, yet the sentence still makes perfect sense.
However, sometimes certain words which are not strictly necessary, help convey something else that the “simpler” phrasing doesn’t do on its own. A simple example: I could say something was “the best result”. It’s more ‘waffly’ to say something was “the least worst result”. There’s a whole extra word there, but I’d argue that the second phrase conveys something else: that this result was the best result out of a series of bad options. Does that make sense?
Anyway, this is (ironically) a ridiculously waffly way of introducing you to an article about removing redundant words. Here’s the article.
Do you agree with Benjamin’s assessments here? Either way, it’s food for thought.
Andy Jones Online 