Clutter

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Clutterand simplicity
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What is clutter?

• Clutter is a disease that strangles language in
  unnecessary words, roundabout constructions,
  pompous decoration and meaningless jargon
• It infects us with a tendency to inflate and
  sound important
• The disease is usually worse in better educated,
  higher-ranking people

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What the airline pilot said

• We are presently anticipating our trajectory
  passing through considerable atmospheric
  turbulence.
• What he meant
• Theres a storm ahead and it may get bumpy.

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What the university president said

• We have been experiencing very considerable
  potentially explosive expressions of
  dissatisfaction on issues only partially related
  to academics
• What he meant
• The students have been hassling us about various
  things.

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Strip every sentence to its cleanest components

• Cut every word that serves no function
• Needless to say, it is necessary for us to reduce
  the deficit ?
• Turn long words into short words
• Interminable dialogue ?
• Cut adverbs that carry the same meaning as the
  verb
• He ran quickly to the bank ?
• Turn passive sentences into active sentences
• The trees were being fallen from by leaves ?

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Work together
to market your crops
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Fighting clutter

• Like fighting weeds the writer is always
  slightly behind
• New varieties sprout overnight
• Now used to be now
• Today, now at this point in time at the
  present time currently

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More clutter

• Up
• Head up a committee Head a committee
• Face up to problems Face problems
• Personal
• My personal friend My friend
• My personal assistant My assistant
• To my personal advantage To my advantage

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Spot the unneeded words

• Lessons learned Lessons
• Future plans Plans
• Background information Background (or leave
  it out)
• Very unique Unique
• First introduced Introduced
• New innovation Innovation
• Early beginnings Start

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Words to watch

• Context
• In the Vietnamese context In Vietnam
• Level
• At the farm level On the farm
• Case
• In the case of sorghum, Sorghum yields yields
  rose by 10 rose by 10
• Respectively
• Yields of rice and maize rose by 3 and 12
  respectively
• Rice yields rose 3 maize yields went up 12.

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Yet more clutter

• Experiencing
• Weather broadcast At the present time we are
  experiencing precipitation Its raining
• Dentist Are you experiencing any
  pain? Does it hurt?

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Things to avoid

• Avoid sentences that begin with
• I might add
• It should be pointed out that
• It is interesting to note that
• Avoid inflated prepositions and conjunctions
• Examples
• With the possible exception of Except
• For the reason that Because
• He totally lacked the ability to He couldnt
• She was unable to give any information beyond
  the fact that She said

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Things to avoid

• More inflation
• With the aim of adapting To adapt
• The objective of the project was to The project
  aimed to

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Checklist for avoiding clutter

• Re-examine every sentence you write
• Is every word doing useful work?
• Can any thought be expressed more briefly?
• Does anything sound pompous or pretentious?
• Are you keeping any word only because you think
  its beautiful?
• Tool for cutting clutter
• Rogets Thesaurus or any other good dictionary of
  synonyms.

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Three rules for cutting clutter

• SIMPLIFY
• SIMPLIFY
• SIMPLIFY