IT Professionals

Wordiness – 5 Ways To Avoid It

Posted by on Oct 13, 2010 | One Comment

There should be an image here!One thing I’ve noticed about us IT Professionals is that we sure like to insert unnecessary words into sentences. As a result, we end up with very wordy documents that only distract the readers from the points we’re trying to get across.

Want to make your writing less wordy (and thereby more effective)? Here are five tips you can try to reduce wordiness:

  1. Remove unnecessary words such as “very” and “extremely.”
  2. Remove unnecessary phrases such as “As a result,” “Given the fact that,” “For the purpose of,” etc.
  3. Omit the word “this” from a sentence by joining it to the preceding sentence using a comma.
  4. Replace passive verbs with active verbs.
  5. Avoid starting sentences with “It is” and “There are.”

[Photo above by Dimitri N / CC BY-ND 2.0]

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  • http://thirdworldcounty.us David

    “Omit the word “this” from a sentence by joining it to the preceding sentence using a comma.” An example would help here. Are you advocating comma splices? Please don’t. There are enough subliterate screeds being published (quite often by “tech writers” ;-) ) as it is. If the sentences are two independent subject-verb statements then they must be joined by a comma AND conjunction or a semi-colon, NOT just a comma.