Avoiding not only a redundancy but a multiple redundancy in the same breath

[Joe Carillo]

Question e-mailed by reader Mr. Geronimo I. Amigable (February 18, 2019):

Sir:

Please educate me on the following sentence: "The reason why I skipped the event was due to sickness."

Question: Is it redundant to use both "reason" and "why"?

And, relative to the placing of the question mark above, is it okay the way I did or it should have been placed before the last quotation mark?

Thank you.

My reply to Mr. Ron Amigable:

                                IMAGE CREDIT: PINTEREST.PH


Yes, in this sentence you presented, "The reason why I skipped the event was due to sickness," it's not only redundant to use both "reason" and "why" but even ultra redundant to add the phrase "was due to." All those three grammar elements--"reason," "why," and "was due to"--actually denote the same thing and constitute a multiple redundancy.

The most concise and direct way to make that statement is, "I skipped the event due to sickness." Conversationally and even more naturally, it's even better to just say, "I skipped the event because I was sick."

Also, your placement of the question mark in the following question is erroneous:

    Is it redundant to use both "reason" and "why"?

The correct way to construct that question is to consider the words "reason" and "why" as a single phrase, "reason why," in which case the adjective "both" becomes clearly unnecessary:

    Is it redundant to use the phrase "reason why"?

The obvious answer is, of course, that the phrase "reason why" is a redundancy by and of itself. You have the choice of dropping one or the other: "I reason I skipped the event was an illness." "An illness was why I skipped the event." (Your use of the noun "sickness" is OK, of course, but it just seems to me more natural to use "illness" in a situation like this.)

I must add here that I get the feeling that what you really had in mind was to ask this scrupulously correct question:

    Is it redundant to use the phrase "reason why" and why?

In the construction above, the first "why" is part of the phrase "reason why," so it must be inside the closing quotation mark for that phrase; of course, the second "why" asks why the phrase "reason why" is redundant, so it needs neither an opening quotation mark nor a closing quotation mark.

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