50 Awkward or Wordy Phrasing

I generally dislike Strunk & White’s popular The Elements of Style, but I love one piece of advice in it: “Omit needless words.” It’s a beautiful example of what it proclaims. Note that needless does not mean “write short sentences” or “write only summaries” or something like that. It’s not about length. It’s about necessity.

The following words are filler — avoid them unless absolutely necessary (and even then, give them a second thought): very, a lot, really, rather, pretty (as in “pretty boring”), little (as in “a little awkward”), just (as in “just a little annoying”), somewhat, well (as in, “Well, it was really rather pretty awful”).

Also, here’s a type of sentence I commonly see:

In “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P. Lovecraft it suggests that the universe is ruled by gods that don’t care at all about human beings.

Aside from not knowing what exactly the “it” refers to, the problem with this sort of sentence is that it could be much more gracefully written:

“The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P. Lovecraft suggests that the universe is ruled by gods that don’t care at all about human beings.

Or, if you’re certain that what you want to suggest is that Lovecraft himself believed this (probably not true, but more likely if you were writing about an essay instead of a short story):

In “The Call of Cthulhu”, H.P. Lovecraft suggests that…

Word order matters a lot in contemporary English.  Pay attention to your wording.