A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
Page 64
An ATM machine is an Automated Teller Machine machine, and an SAT test is a Scholastic Assessment Test test, formerly known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test test. Seventy percent, or in some cases even more, of the Usage Panel is willing to overlook the redundancy of these expressions, probably because they have become fixed from so much use.
1
Wordiness
In a world in which efficiency has become a prime value, most people view economy in wording as a sign of intelligence. Its opposite, therefore, is often considered a sign of stupidity. Most of us are busy and impatient people. We hate to wait. Using too many words is like asking people to stand in line until you get around to the point. It is irritating, which hardly helps when you are trying to win someone’s goodwill or show that you know what you’re talking about. What is worse, using too many words often makes it difficult to understand what is being said. It forces a reader to work hard to figure out what is going on, and in many cases the reader may simply decide it is not worth the effort. Another side effect of verbosity is the tendency to sound overblown, pompous, and evasive. What better way to turn off a reader?
2
It is easy to recommend concision in expression but much harder to figure out how to achieve it. In general, wordy writing has three distinguishing characteristics: weak verbs, ponderous nouns, and lots of prepositional phrases. The three are interconnected.
3
The key to writing clearly and concisely is to use strong active verbs. This means that you should only use the passive voice when you have a solid reason for doing so. (For more on this, see
passive voice in this chapter and
verbs, voice of under Grammar.) If you look down a page you have written and see that you are relying on forms of the verb be and other weak verbs like seem and appear, you can often boil down what you have written to a fraction of its size by revising with active verbs.
4
Relying on weak verbs forces you to shunt much of your meaning into nouns. These nouns tend to be abstract and Latinate, ending in -ment, -tion, and -ence. The nouns themselves need a proper grammatical home, and the only way to show how they relate to other parts of the sentence is to put the nouns in prepositional phrases. Here is an example:
It is essential to acknowledge that one of the drawbacks to the increased utilization of part-time employees is that people who are still engaged full-time by the company are less likely to be committed to the recognition and identification of problems in the production area.
5
This passage has 45 words. We can boil it down to 14 by cutting out the unnecessary words, using active verbs, and using noun modifiers to do the work of prepositional phrases:
Using more part-time employees often makes full-time employees less willing to report production problems.
