Self-Editing Tip: Delete Your Pleonasms
What do these sentences have in common?
She nodded her head up and down.
He squinted his eyes.
She shrugged her shoulders.
All he could see, from horizon to horizon, was frozen ice.
These sentences all use more words than are necessary to convey meaning. You can only nod your head,* and a nod only goes up and down. You can’t squint anything but your eyes, just as you can’t shrug anything but your shoulders. Ice is frozen; it’s always frozen. When ice isn’t frozen, it’s just … water.
Adding those extra words creates a type of redundancy called pleonasm. As an editor, I also find those phrases pet peeves, and I kill them dead.
See what I did there? “Kill them dead” is another pleonasm. You can’t kill something halfway.
Most pleonasms are stylistic errors, but you can use a pleonasm as a stylistic choice to add emphasis:
“I saw it with my own eyes.”
Whose eyes? My OWN eyes!
Some phrases, like “free gift” or “foreign imports” or “tuna fish” are used so often together that it can be hard to recognize that they contain redundancies.
When you spot pleonasms in your writing, it’s best to delete the redundancy, as many readers will consider it an error. Aside from that, deleting any redundancies just makes your writing tighter, which can help it become more powerful. And, if you’re focused on a tight word count, deleting redundancy is an easy way to start cutting.
Alternatively, make very, very sure that you INTEND the redundancy because you want to emphasize the thing that is repeated.
When I’m editing someone else’s work, I don’t bother correcting these errors in a developmental edit because the writer typically needs to do a lot of rewriting after they receive my feedback.
I will edit pleonasms in a line edit since a line edit focuses on readability and beauty of the prose.
I probably wouldn’t edit pleonasms in a final copy edit/proofread. The use of pleonasm is a style error, which means it can be argued that it is a style choice, and rarely impedes the reader’s understanding of the work. By the time you’re doing a proofread, you are typically looking only for egregious errors. You absolutely want to ensure you don’t introduce NEW errors while trying to fix something that doesn’t necessarily need fixing.
As you revise your writing, go ahead and remove any pleonasms you see. It will tighten your writing, and relieve persnickety folks like me who twitch when we read them!
* OK, so it’s not entirely true that you can only nod your head. James S. A. Corey, in his series The
Expanse, created a hand- and body-gesture-based language for people who work in bulky space suits.
You can’t see someone nodding in a space suit, so in his world, spacers “nod their fist.”
Links for your reference, if you’d like to learn more:
NPR: Please don’t have a temper tantrum about the pleonasm in this headline
George Carlin’s “Count the Superfluous Redundant Pleonastic Tautologies”