I hope you could see that this is spoken/pedagogic. If not, revise the list of the characteristics of the spoken and then count the examples in the passage.
The most important difference between the written and the spoken is identified in the passage itself - the level of redundancy. All the information in those 118 words of spoken discourse can be conveyed in 18 words of written discourse:
Effective communication depends on the awareness that in writing lower levels of redundancy are expected than in speech.
In other words the original passage had a redundancy level of approximately 85%. If we applied this to an MA dissertation of 15,000 words, for example, only 1,000 words would convey any meaning and the dissertation would be a complete failure.
However, a redundancy rate of 85% is not unusual and would be perfectly acceptable in a first draft. Here the objective should simply be to get a few ideas and the outline of an argument. Then the hard work begins of reducing the redundancy and exploring the ideas in the space (perhaps 85%) that you have created.
Therefore, this entire course is based on the following premise:
Deciding and creating an appropriate level of redundancy is the most crucial factor in writing well.
Before we practise techniques to reduce redundancy and therefore transform the spoken characteristics of a first draft into the more concise written style of a second draft, we need to examine the nature of redundancy.
Redundancy can be divided into three categories. Firstly there is simple repetition. Secondly there is periphrasis, and thirdly tautology. The first of these, simple repetition, is the recurrence or reiteration of words, phrases or even, in some cases, of whole sentences. By periphrasis we mean the use of many words to express an idea which could, in fact, be expressed by using fewer words. We can see what exactly this means most clearly if we look at an example of periphrasis: the periphrastic phrase
"the people of America" could be replaced by the single word "Americans". Tautology is the use of words or phrases whose meaning has already been conveyed by other words. To give just one example of tautology, it might be useful to consider the expression "parents who have children" in which the phrase "who have children" is redundant as its meaning has already been conveyed by the use of the noun "parents".
Try to reduce the redundancy in the above passage about redundancy. How many of the 155 words are unnecessary?
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© 2002 Martin Paterson