How To Identify And Avoid Superfluous Words In A Research Paper

A sentence should never contain words that are superfluous or unnecessary. Like William Strunk Jr. says in his book, Elements of Style, that these words can be compared to the unnecessary parts of a machine or the extra lines in a drawing that are not necessary at all. Wordiness is, in fact, one of the vices that editors have to deal with on a daily basis.

Identify the superfluous words

Redundant words are usually done away with from manuscripts by good editors so that the readers do not have to get lost in a maze of words. Do you always come across words that are far too long? Are these sentences so full of superfluous words that you find yourself reading and re-reading them time and again? Your paper definitely contains words that are redundant and needs to be edited. This is just a common mistake that keeps happening time and again. However, if you find it frustrating to go through your research paper for superfluous words, you should consider taking the help of a good editing company.

Make your manuscript stand out

It is crucial that you fix these redundant words to make your manuscript stand out from the rest of the research papers. Try to use qualifiers or intensifiers that will increase or decrease the characteristics of the word that has been modified. Sometimes, people word their research papers with abstract words just to increase the word count. This is known as logorrhoea. Sometimes, sentences are laden with so many qualifiers and adjectives that it becomes extremely difficult to read the manuscript and it becomes unnecessarily complicated. If you come across such superfluous words, you would need to fix them immediately so that the manuscript can become readable once again. If you are still not sure how to handle them, it would be best to approach a professional editor who works with an editing company.

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