3 Comments
Oct 18Liked by Mallary Tenore Tarpley

That is a great list of unnecessarily wordy phrases. I'm going to keep that around for my day job, editing legal writing. Lawyers are addicted to nominalizations and excessive uses of "to be" verbs! Have you heard of E-Prime? It's a way of writing English without the verb for "to be." I find it really useful to seek out and destroy unnecessary uses of "is," "are" and "was" when I'm editing.

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I'm glad the list is helpful.

It's funny you mention nominalizations; I just recently taught my students about those!

I haven't heard of E-Prime; I'm going to have to check it out!

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Some treasure here!

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