9 ms·
This reminds me of an English teacher I had in high school who disallowed us from using a list of banned words in a writing assignment. In previous assignments
by Maciek416 13y ago
This reminds me of an English teacher I had in high school who disallowed us from using a list of banned words in a writing assignment. In previous assignments students had overused them to pad their word count and to inflate the apparent sophistication of their vocabulary. Among these words were "basically" and "essentially" which he told us were garbage words (as far as essay-writing as concerned). It stuck with me.
There seem to be many words which are useful in conversation but for whatever reason are not that good for efficient writing, or so overused in speech (for lack of better words as one scrambles for word choice in real time) that it's hard to avoid using them in writing.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoSee also: "really" and "actually". An easy way to improve your writing is to do a quick edit and remove all instances of these no-op words then go back and adjust.
- yoha 13y agoI'd go further: run a analysis of word frequencies and identify the meaningless ones amongst the most frequent.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoIndeed. Even if you're using a "better" word than "really" or "very" or what-have-you excess repetition of any word will dull the quality of the writing so it's a good thing to watch out for. And it may seem that this is a mistake that is difficult to make but because of the difference between writing and reading, where one may spend many minutes or even hours writing something that only takes a few seconds to read, it's easy to forget that you've repeated a word too often.
- Zikes 13y agoAlso, "of course" and "obviously".
- j2kun 13y agoThe most useful words for a mathematical writer :)
- walshemj 13y agowell Macie at the end of the day it worked for Dickens and Dumas :-) Apologizes for using footballer speak :-)
- sabbatic13 13y agoRules like these aren't really good guide to style though. They are the sort of guidelines suited to curing teenagers of bad habits. That's the problem I have with articles like these. They aren't adult discussions of language; they do not teach effective writing, and do not promote an understanding of language. One should ideally outgrow such pedagogy by one's second year of college.
- Argorak 13y agoI understood that as a temporary constraint, not as a rule. More like "you used this style a lot during the last assignment, this time, try something different". Working under temporary constraints does promote learning different aspects of a skill.
- cgh 13y agoThe Economist Style Guide disagrees: http://www.economist.com/style-guide/unnecessary-words http://www.economist.com/style-guide/unnecessary-words
- bane 13y agoThe key is to learn to write well before becoming a staff writer at the Economist. These guidelines are fine, but all of these nonos have good uses when used appropriately. Some of these guidelines even create imprecision or run counter to general usage. My father (an ex-English teacher) used to always say something like "concision is rarely wrong, unless it ruins precision."
- sdegutis 13y agoBut what about "thusly"? I'm pretty sure that should never be used.
- dllthomas 13y agoIt can, on occasion, be used thusly.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
- dllthomas 13y agoMight be interesting to automatically keep a running count of words used in your writing (across formats), and make a habit of avoiding what you've been overusing.
- gweinberg 13y agoOr it might be useful to do te exact opposite: analyze your writing to determine where you are using obscure words when there are common words which mean the exact same thing.
- dllthomas 13y agoThat is not quite the exact opposite, as they draw from different corpora. Both would be interesting and quite possibly useful.
- romaniv 13y agoThere is no need to avoid useful words, even if they are used often. The problem is with words that don't change what you say while making it longer.
- dllthomas 13y agoThere's some use to most restrictions you can put on writing, simply to break old habits and grow. Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. I meant it more as an exercise than a rule (which is why I said "might be interesting...").