Welcome to 🍏Lunch N Learn with Lindsay🍏 Issue 189. I had an interesting conversation with one of my Essential PA Programme learners the other day when I gave her feedback on her assignment submission. My learner was struggling with word count on the first Task of the assignment brief and needed some advice on how to get that count down. I was only too glad to help and, between us, we ran through her work. I suggested ways to reduce the word count whilst still retaining the essential content to satisfy the assignment marking criteria. As well as “bulleting” some information and shortening some sentences (we got rid of a lot of “ands”!!), we also focused on “tautology”. “Tautology” is when you use two words or phrases that mean the same thing and which are unnecessary or unhelpful in your sentence structure. My learner hadn’t heard of this term which is why I thought it would be useful to introduce it as a topic for this week’s Lunch n Learn, as ever to give you some “food for thought”. Tautological sentences and expressions include redundant words, and are usually considered writing errors. By highlighting these in my learners work we were able to remove redundant words and reduce the word count. Here are some examples: “In my opinion, I think…” (5 words) can become “ “I get to the office at 8am in the morning” (10 words) can become “I get to the office at 8am Of course, you don’t want to step into the shoes of the “tautology police” entirely. If you lose something by removing redundant words (for example emphasis, clarity, content flow) put them back in. Intentional repetition is a great way to add a poetic or creative element to your sentence structure too. As examples, “In close proximity” doesn’t have the same emphasis as “in proximity”. and “I’m sure you’re so excited about this newfound learning, you can’t contain your enthusiasm.” |
