Effective Communication -IV : A Word A Week

Folks,

This week’s AWAW is little different to the AWAW, you folks have seen so far. In today’s effective communication series we will talk about few words which are best if avoided. In doing so I will be giving a guideline as well of how to spot such words and avoid using in Business Communication. We can extend this style of writing beyond Business Communication.


I am referring to the word “pleonasm”. Pleonasm? I haven’t used this word at all is what most of you folks might have been thinking , well you haven’t used the word per say but most of us including me have used this in some form. Pleonasm mean "more-ness" in Greek , in plain English it mean redundant. Can you think unnecessary adjectives added to create more substance ? That is what I am referring to here. Here are some examples of pleonasm . (Redundant words italics)



1. Advance Planning (Isn’t Planning always in advance?)

2. Final Outcome (Is there any form of outcome which is not final)

3. End Product (You get the idea)

4. General Public ( I like this word, the more I read this, I begin to laugh thinking about it)

5. Joint Collaboration( I wish I could collaborate with just myself J )

6. Merge together

7. Past History ( Imagine history is future , lol)

8. Prototype Model

9. Still Continue

10. Proposed Plan



The list doesn’t stop there but look around, we use such words see such words being used by Press as well. The press thinks it is the clever way of writing to keep us folks interested and we start picking up on such redundant words and we play God (No blasphemy intended here) by creating words. Another of such culprits who create such words or such usage are Sports Commentators. They think they are creating a superlative by using such words, in effect it creates a sort of emptiness if you look at it clearly. Here is a quote from a well known Cricket Commentator when Tendulkar struck a boundary . “ Tendulkar hit this ball all the way to the boundary”, is there a way to get to boundary than going all the way? If you watch clearly all promises made by Politicians have a lot of redundant words as well , to divert your attention of the problem to create mammoth impression , well next time you start identifying this you will see what an Empty vessel they are.





For folks interested in Etymology here is the scoop



he use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense (as in the man he said) : redundancy Latin, for this



Origin First Known Use: 1610







My recommendation for this week is please refrain using redundant words or words which are pleonasm by nature.




Reference:

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pleonasm

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