Avoiding Redundancies and Simplifying Sentence Structure

What is redundancy?

Redundancy is unnecessarily repeating something. It is describing something obvious, like evil devil. Evil is inherently implied in the word devil so it does not need to be stated before the word.

This often happens as a result of the education system putting emphasis on adding words to papers, but that is the exact opposite of what we want in business writing. ‘Fluffing up’ our writing often results in redundancy. See the below examples of the same message being conveyed in a redundant way, and a concise way.

Redundant

At this point in time, it now becomes necessary for us to consider alternative possibilities for the
purposes of our goals.

Still Redundant

It now becomes necessary for us to consider alternative possibilities for the purposes of our
goals.

Somewhat Redundant

It now becomes necessary for us to consider alternatives for the purposes of our goals.

Concise

It now becomes necessary for us to consider alternatives.

The Ideal Message

We now need to consider alternatives.

We have just dropped 21 words to 6. Aim for this.

Try to think about the information you have written, and if the content is content that the guest needs to hear or if it’s just the words that have popped into your head.