You Can Say That Again

A light look at how we fill our writing, our speech, and our thoughts with needlessly repetitive (okay, just repetitive) words. Includes a list of 750 redundant phrases we hear and use--say it ain't so!--every day.

It started with a simple idea. When Connie Giordano and Al Martine, owners of the TechWhirl website, invited me to write an article, I decided to collect some of the redundant phrases I ran across in my editing projects, phrases that made me smile. Why not share the pleasure? “That one’s going on the list,” I found myself saying day after day. After the TechWhirl article was published in October of 2013, I couldn’t stop. The list grew. And grew. I smiled every time I read or heard (or said) things like this: sufficient enough tall in stature equal halves overly paranoid long-term rather than short-term mutual benefit for all involved “That one’s going on the list.” Others caught the fever. The phrases rolled in from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Listly--even from across the dinner table. Two hundred. Three hundred. Six hundred. A new book called to me. Now it calls to you.

Marcia Riefer Johnston has been known to repeat herself; just ask her kids. Her words have appeared in lots of places, including her previous book, "Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build from Them)."