The success of a project hinges upon advance planning, whether it’s your studies, business, or a shopping spree. We have the habit of venturing on and planning along the way. Advance planning is the hallmark of maturity, wisdom and strength of character. In my personal opinion, advance planning is the best utilisation of your power of reasoning and faculty of rationality. The fact is that the end result of careful advance planning is always success and it reduces the chances of facing defeat as an end result. Your future plans and advance planning must go hand in hand during the times when the margin of error is minimal. Our past history tells us that we always revert back to the fundamentals of advance planning and mutual cooperation after meeting unexpected surprises due to unintentional mistakes that are repeated again and again.
Our close proximity to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh might help us understand the absence of some absolutely essential safeguards against economic collapse. Before we are completely finished, we must collaborate together to merge our differences to nurture a consensus of opinion. We must continue devising new innovations for the added bonus of securing foreign imports. The question still remains as to what is needed for a new beginning. Out of important essentials, the most perfect planning is the advance planning — the honest truth of human effort. You might temporarily suspend your reasoning for a period of time to foresee the final outcome of your efforts, unprepared for any unexpected emergency.
It is interesting to note that in today’s modern world, strongly held beliefs are so deeply entrenched in our mindsets that a lack of advance planning causes serious national crises despite extremely heated discussions both in the parliament and media. It must be pointed out that the opposition, with its new fresh candidates, poses a more serious threat to the smooth running of the parliamentary sessions. The sudden shock appearance of the prime minister triggers a violent clash between the treasury and the opposition. The speaker of the national assembly adjourns the session when a minister whispers softly something in his ear. The fact is that mutual cooperation is a necessary requirement for dealing with the national problems posing serious dangers to national security.
If you have failed in noticing the bumps of redundancy in the flow of the above motley-stitched sentences, it means you are like the countless second language users who are prone to such wordiness, particularly when they try and show off their Anglophilia. In ‘free gift’, ‘free’ is unnecessary as its opposite ‘paid gift’ doesn’t exist. In ‘advance planning’, advance is redundant, as all planning is done in advance. ‘Honest truth’ belies the truthness of a truth. Never tow ‘together’ behind ‘collaborate’, nor yoke ‘absolutely’ with ‘essential’.
In each of ‘end result’ and ‘final outcome’, both the constituting parts are not draught animals yoked together, as the result and outcome are always what come at the end. In ‘true fact’, ‘past history’ and ‘mutual cooperation’, ‘true’, ‘past’ and ‘mutual’ are just superfluous collocations to be pruned. ‘Unintentional mistakes’ and ‘unexpected surprises’ are just mistakes and surprises. ‘Repeat’ is to do something again; hence, it need not be followed by ‘again’. Similarly, ‘revert’ must not be backed by ‘back’. Proximity denotes closeness; don’t make it closer. What is unique and perfect can’t be made more unique and more perfect. Otherwise, uniqueness and perfection will spill over.
‘Completely finished’ is just ‘finished’. Consensus is based on opinions; hence, don’t say ‘consensus of opinion’ because it can’t be of any other thing but opinions. In ‘new innovations’ and ‘foreign imports’, ‘new’ doesn’t add newness to what is innovative, and ‘foreign’ cannot make ‘imports’ alien. ‘Still’ must not remain with ‘remain’. A ‘beginning’ cannot be new or old. The neutrality preceding ‘that’ is a killjoy. Things must be interesting or important without being premised on ‘it is interesting to note that’ or ‘it must be pointed out that’.
Sometimes, redundancies are used for stress, but they can be done without. In ‘today’s modern world’, it is sufficient to say ‘modern world’. Similarly, ‘beliefs’ need not be qualified by ‘strongly held’, as beliefs are already ideas strongly held. Pare off ‘deeply’ from ‘deeply entrenched’, ‘serious’ from ‘crises’ and ‘extremely’ from ‘extremely heated discussions’. In ‘violent clash’, ‘violent’ adds to the stress whereas in ‘sudden shock’, ‘sudden’ fails to shock the ‘shock’. ‘New fresh’ need not stand together. ‘Whisper softly’ is wrong, as nothing can be said more softly than a whisper. Hack off ‘absolutely’ from ‘essential’ and ‘necessary’ from ‘requirement’.
Prolixities are owed to bilingualism as well. In ‘my personal opinion’, ‘personal’ is borrowed from its Urdu equivalent, meri zati raaey mein. Cooperation is always mutual. Again, its Urdu equivalent, baahmi ta’awun, staples ‘mutual’ with ‘cooperation’. Similarly, ‘added bonus’ comes from Urdu’s izzafi bonus. ‘To suspend’ is to halt something temporarily; collocating ‘temporarily’ with ‘suspend’ will not make it more temporary. Oops, ‘temporary’ can’t be more or less.
In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White have particularly mentioned in the chapter Omit Needless Words the clauses containing ‘the fact that’ to be revised with a fresh pair of eyes to weed them out. Instead of ‘I was unaware of the fact that’, ‘I was unaware that’ does the job and gives the reader latitude of discretion. The use of ‘the fact’ suggests that the reader take for granted whatever the writer say — a demand born out of artistic lethargy.
Insufficient knowledge of locutions and collocations, which can be enhanced by x-ray reading of quality content, might rope in extra words. Though the purists of grammar label it as a crime, it is not a crime of malice but of habit. The sacred rule to determine the purpose of a word or a sentence is that every word must tell, rather speak, and each succeeding sentence must add to the purport of its predecessor. ‘Is every word doing new and useful work?’ is the classic advice William Zinsser offers in On Writing Well to help us purge our writing of all the fluff.