Strategies for avoiding repetition and abstruse stock phrases(First of a 3-part series)This is the first of a 3-part series on how to get rid of the repetitive and abstruse stock phrases that seep into our own English after our repeated exposure to bureaucratese, legalese, and academese—phrases that soon make us sound like petty bureaucrats, lawyers, and academicians ourselves. The second part will come out on Wednesday, February 14, and the third on Friday, February 16.
For those who’d like to get rid of the unpleasant bureaucratic tone of their English, I wrote an essay, “Phrases desirable and phrases abstruse,” in my
Manila Times column way back in 2004. I observed in that essay that bureaucrats, lawyers, and not a few academicians use a lot of officious stock phrases such as “by virtue of,” “with reference to,” “in connection with,” “with regard to,” “in order to,” “with respect to,” “in line with,” and—perhaps most irksome of all—“this is to inform you that” for both bad and good news and everything in-between.
I said that those phrases make their English sound so highhanded and even threatening, but we learn to tolerate them because they are ostensibly part and parcel of their professional jargon. The problem though is that through repeated exposure to these stock phrases, we eventually appropriate them in our own writing and speech without even realizing it. Indeed, in time many of us begin to sound like petty bureaucrats, lawyers, and academicians ourselves. Against our better judgment, their jargon permeates not only our conversations with our friends and coworkers but also our own memos, letters, and reports.
The core of my argument was that we should avoid those officious stock phrases like the plague, and that we shouldn’t allow tradition and peer-group pressure to tyrannize us into using them against our will. I then proposed that in business and in our personal lives, we should aim to write and speak in more concise, more pleasant, and more friendly English.
IMAGE CREDIT: CARTOONSTOCK.COMThat essay of mine drew the following interesting response from Tanzania-based Forum member Mwita Chacha:
“I agree that the best way to effectively get our ideas across is by making our sentences as precise as possible. But as a beginning writer, I sometimes feel reluctant to use a word more than two times in the same writing. That’s why I’m sometimes tempted to alternate, say, ‘about’ with unpleasant bureaucratic phrases like ‘with regard to,’ ‘with reference to,’ and ‘as regards.’ Admittedly, they sound standoffish and tend to just get in the way of clear communication, but I think they help in many ways to eradicate repetition in the prose. Is there any better tactic of getting rid of repetition?”
This question gives me a much welcome opportunity to break new ground in my advocacy for plain and simple English. I am therefore sharing my reply to Mwita Chacha with everyone desirous of having a better and more pleasant command of their written and spoken English:
Let me begin by saying that the repeated use of a particular word in writing is not bad per se; what has to be studiously avoided is the dysfunctional overuse of any word. And I wouldn’t use the word “tactic” to describe such studious avoidance, for a tactic seems too fleeting and too short-term an approach for dealing with unpleasant overrepetition. Instead, I’d go for the word “strategy” to describe the more methodical and wide-ranging way for achieving that objective.
To come up with such a strategy, we first need to clearly distinguish between the two general types of words in English, and then to better understand the matter of language register and tonality.
The two general types of words in English are, of course, the content words and the function words. The
content words are the carriers of meaning of the language, and they consist of the nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections. The
function words are the logical operators of the language, and they consist of
the prepositions,
the conjunctions (the coordinating conjunctions and the subordinating conjunctions), and
the conjunctive adverbs. In a class of their own are the
articles “a,” “an,” and “the,” which many grammarians consider as neither content words nor function words.
Among the content words,
nouns are the most amenable to substitution with other words as a strategy for avoiding tedious repetition. We will discuss these strategies for using functional alternatives for nouns in the next part of this series.
(Next:
Strategies for avoiding tedious repetition of words - II) February 14, 2018
This essay, 847th in the series, first appeared in Jose A. Carillo’s weekly “English Plain and Simple” column in the June 29, 2013 issue of The Manila Times
, © 2013 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.RELATED READING IN THE FORUM:Phrases desirable and phrases abstruse (2004)
