“Many of the most needless words are little ones that fill up sentences the way ‘um’ and ‘like’ and ‘you know’ fill up speech. They creep into writing when the author is afraid of sounding plain or unprofessional.” So says Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review, Harvard College Library, writing in “Good Writing Matters – No Matter the Profession” on the Harvard Extension School website.
With this in mind, we continue our series on superfluous words with another 20 that you can do without!
Eliminate
it has long been known that
Interestingly enough
Reduce
forecast future sales
make an attempt to try to
Reduce to one word
complete stop
gentle breeze
already existing
broad spectrum
wide variety
diverse cross-section
full potential
place a burden on
Replace with one word
an adequate number of enough
a lot of many
an integral part (of) part (of)
an overwhelming majority most
arrive at an agreement agree
in a nutshell briefly
take into account consider
with reference to the fact that concerning
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