One of the first lessons you learn as a writer is to write tight. You’ve been taught to let the words to flow without any excess verbiage. Once you’ve finished your novel, short story, article or essay, you edit and polish it to the best of your ability in preparation to sending it into the world to find a home. You remove out all those pesky extra adjectives and substitute strong verbs for those week verbs modified by adverbs. You’re ready for publication. But, wait a minute. Before you put your piece in an envelope or hit the send button, ask yourself one question. Have I eliminated all the pleonasms?
Never heard of them and don’t know what they are? Don’t feel alone. Most folks wouldn’t know a pleonasm if one landed on their nose. As a writer you not only need to know what they are, you must be able to recognize them and pluck them from your prose. Here’s the definition:
A pleonasm is a word or phrase which can be removed from a sentence without changing its meaning. For example, “John walked to the chair and sat down.” Down is a pleonasm and can be removed without changing the meaning of the sentence. Another one I’ve seen lately in my critique group is, ‘grabbed up’ as in, “Peter ran into the room and grabbed up his pistol.” Up adds nothing to the sentence and should be removed.
You may be asking yourself right about now, are a few pleonasms in my novel fatal? Will I be rejected because of those extra words? Probably not, but always remember – you want to present the best, tightest most error-free manuscript to an editor for publication. Why take a chance? Pull up a chair, boot up your computer and go through that Great American Novel one more time. You may be surprised at just how many pleonasms you can remove.
If you’re not sure about a pleonasm in your text, Google pleonasms and you’ll find several lists on the Internet. One good site I found is: http://www.wordfocus.com/pleonasm.html
Until next time, Happy Writing!
