How to Eliminate Redundancy from Your Writing

Redundancy is one of the curses all writers must bear. Usually, repeating yourself over and over again is symptomatic of your own indecision and poor planning. When you aren’t certain exactly how (and when) you want to convey a particular idea or fact, you wind up repeating it several different times in different ways. Whenever possible, however, you want to eliminate redundancy from your writing.

To make you feel a little bit better about yourself, you should know that all writers struggle with redundancy. Even the famous novelists like Stephen King, Anne Rice and Dean Koontz slip up, sometimes on purpose and sometimes just because they can’t help themselves. Sometimes this means that they are trying to drive a point home, even when the reader already gets it.

To eliminate redundancy from your writing, it is absolutely necessary that you be honest with yourself. If you are unable to objectively and ruthlessly edit your work, it is doubtful that you will be able to pick out the times when you needlessly repeat yourself. A redundancy can happen when you repeat the same fact twice; it can also happen when you add pointless explanation.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a fiction story and you’ve come to a section of dialogue. Let’s suppose further that your characters are arguing about something one of them did to the other. To convey the tension of the scene, you might write something like:

“I’m so mad I could smack you!” Roger said angrily.

This is a form of redundancy because we already know Roger is angry by what he said. In fact, he told the other character that he was “mad”, so the word “angrily” is completely unnecessary. To eliminate redundancy from your writing, you must allow your dialogue and description to speak for itself—showing rather than telling.

For another example of redundancy in writing, imagine that you’re describing one of your characters. It might read: Claire was one of the most popular teachers at River County High School. Her students adored her whimsical personality and they learned more than they realized from her animated—and sometimes eccentric—-explanations of theory.” Then you decide you want to drive this point home, so you add on the next page: “A favorite among her students, Claire…” This comes from writer’s insecurity and you must realize that repeating yourself needlessly is insulting to your readers.

Of course, there are times when redundancy in your writing is necessary. When writing for the Web, you must be redundant with keywords and key phrases in order to optimize your writing for search engines. Skilled writers also use purposeful redundancies to make a point in their writing, though this is something that beginners should avoid.

Next time you write a story or an article, go through your work and circle words and phrases that you tend to use most often. You can also circle descriptions that you’ve repeated or modifiers that aren’t necessary. Then go back to your first draft and eliminate the words or phrases you’ve circled to clean up the prose.