| Welcome to this Issue 270 where I’m inviting you to talk about talking about the same thing twice. I had an interesting chat with one of my learners on The Essential PA Programme last week while giving her feedback on an assignment. She’d been wrestling with the word count in Task 1 and asked for some tips on how to trim it down – without losing the quality or key points needed to meet the marking criteria. Together, we went through her work and found a few easy wins: ✅Turning long sentences into neat bullet points ✅Cutting unnecessary “ands” (there were lots of them!) ✅And most importantly, tackling something called tautology. Tautology is when we say the same thing twice using different words. It’s easy to do without realising it, but it can quickly bulk out your writing and make it less sharp. My learner hadn’t come across the term before, so I thought it was worth sharing here – because once you spot tautology, you’ll start noticing it everywhere. Here are a couple of quick examples we worked on: 💬 “In my opinion, I think…” ➡️ “I think…” 💬 “I get to the office at 8am in the morning.” ➡️ “I get to the office at 8am.” See? Clearer, cleaner, and more confident. Of course, we don’t want to become the tautology police! Sometimes a bit of repetition adds warmth, rhythm, or emphasis – and that’s perfectly fine. The goal isn’t to strip your writing of personality, but to make every word earn its place. After all, as writers, communicators, and professionals, our words are our tools and a well-tuned toolkit is always worth the effort, don’t you agree? Wishing you a great working week! |
