Sunday house and manuscript cleaning in progress... Hope you all have a good one. After chasing adverbs last week, I am now searching for redundancies. Which brings us to the question: What IS superfluous? In some instances this will be in the eye of the beholder. Because if I feel I need to tell you about a poppy-seed covered sofa and you tell me you want to know if there's something more important stuff going on in the room we have a dilemma. Trust me - eventually you will be sorry you didn't know about the poppy-seeds! And that's it: Whatever comes up has to play a role - however tiny it is. Every detail we waste more than a word on has to make sense later on. If it doesn't it gets snipped out (I usually put these snippets in an extra file - can't throw stuff out, one never knows if it's needed later on ;) ). The joys of revising. All the things conjured during creative outbursts - or pained hovering over the keyboard - have to pass the test. And if they don't live up to their promise, it's - next! We have to learn to let go. My heart is bleeding...
Luckily there are redundant phrases - and those I have no trouble backstabbing! Look out for them here:
http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/redundancies.htm
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