Unit 3 Brevity filter

Activity 1 Introduction to the brevity filter

Read.

Writing that is concise or brief contains no unnecessary words. Some people tend to be verbose and use many words. Others tend to be concise and use few words. The aim of this unit is to understand which types of words are unnecessary. When checking your draft using the brevity filter, there are three error types to look out for. Each of the error types are listed below.

1. Using multiple vague words
2. Repeated words
3. Redundant words

Activity 2 Using multiple vague words

Read.

• Corpus example: The concept that was chosen as the focus of this research is XXX.

Genres may be placed on a cline from terse to verbose. Terse genres, such as scientific research articles are concise, but may be considered difficult to read. Verbose genres may be easier to read and understand, but use more words. To quote Faber (2017), “no one wants to read excessively long studies”. Words that do not add substance to the meaning should be omitted. Abstract nouns, such as concept, are rather vague. In this corpus example, concept refers cataphorically to XXX, and as such adds no meaning per se, and thus the first six words can be deleted.

Activity 3 Repeated words

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• Corpus example: We analyze XXX regarding the XXX qualities, XXX qualities and XXX qualities.

Introductory sentences for sections within a research article, tend to list the contents of the section. The corpus example introduces a section that describes three types of qualities. However, the word qualities is unnecessarily repeated three times. This sentence can be improved simply by using the word qualities once at the head of a noun phrase and then listing the three items as modifiers in the tail of the prepositional phrase that modifies the head. Following this suggestion, the revised concise sentence would be:

We analyze XXX regarding the qualities of XXX, XXX and XXX.

Activity 4 Redundant words

Read.

• Corpus example: On each and every occurrence, the XXX was noted.

The determiners each and every have similar but not identical meanings. However, either one on its own is sufficient. They may be used together to show emphasis or to solve translation issues, particularly in legal documents. Legal doublets (Ingels, 2006) are created when near synonyms linked together with a conjunction, which is usually and. Cases in point include aid and abet, terms and conditions, goods and chattels, and so on. Although it can be argued, that only one term would suffice, selecting just one near-synonym may result in the target language translation differing in meaning from the source language as the words are near and not exact synonyms. However, in scientific writing, it is unlikely that a researcher needs to stipulate both each occurrence and every occurrence, and so in this case either term would suffice.