Redundancies

A redundancy is a profuseness that exceeds necessity. In writing, this is an overflow of words that leads to lengthy and sometimes silly sentences. To an editor and many readers, redundancies mark a writer as amateur.

Adjectives often lead to redundancies, as with, "Not now!" he yelled loudly. The verb yelled means to speak loudly, so the use of the adjective is superfluous. The use of the exclamation point reinforces the redundancy.

Here's another redundancy: She ran at a quick jog, which is probably intended to mean she jogged; but the use of JOG as a noun implies she ran at something--in this case, at a...jog (whatever that might be).

Reporters and business people seem fond of saying and writing, "He has a great future ahead of him." Where else would the future be? Another common redundancy is tuna fish. This will probably be in our language forever, but think about it. Does anyone ever say they had trout fish for dinner?

By eliminating redundancies your writing will be tighter and much more professional.