Writing Clearly, Part Two

One important part of writing clearly is learning to edit unnecessary words from your prose. Often we repeat ourselves in writing because we're trying to write the way we talk--something English teachers frequently suggest we do to become more "authentic" writers. When we're speaking, however, we need to repeat ourselves a good bit more than we do when we're writing, because people often aren't very attentive when they hear something; in general, they're more likely to get the essence of something they read with minimum repetition.

Some studies of audience behavior, for example, have suggested that in lecture situations, at any given time about thirty percent of the audience is paying attention. If that's true, a listening audience actually needs a good bit of repetition from a speaker to stay on track with the topic at hand. By contrast, a reading audience tends to comprehend a good bit more of what's written, so too much repetition in written matter can actually hurt a reader: it can make a reader lose focus, skim over areas of text, or lose interest. Go here for a lesson on learning how to weed out excessive repetition from your writing.